Interview by Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus Sergei Martynov to “Associated Press” News Agency

3–3.30 p.m. on March 15, 2006, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus, Minsk

- So we will begin. I guess you have seen the questions already. To begin with, reading the Foreign Ministry’s web-site I have seen that Belarus is emphasizing good relations with neighbouring countries. You are bordering many countries that are sceptical about Belarus’ commitment to democracy and human rights. Does this scepticism of your neighbours impede your foreign policy, and what is Belarus doing to try to overcome this scepticism?

- You are right in terms that one of the priorities of the Belarusian foreign policy is having good relationship with the neighbors. In fact we have a goal of having what we call a “belt of good neighborliness” around Belarus, and we believe that this belt is very much achieved.

Yes, not many but some of our neighbors have differences with us on the subjects you mentioned. But we believe that these differences largely result from the fact that these nations are members of larger alliances, which have their common foreign policy or at least aspire to have a common foreign policy. Therefore the stance of those countries is not always what you might term an independent stance.

We, of course, respect the right of any alliance to have its foreign policy, but this also remains the fact that this is a policy coming from somewhere else, not necessarily from the neighboring environment.

Another issue is that we strongly believe, and I believe this sentiment is largely shared also in all our neighboring countries, that there is an important special nature in relationship of neighbors, irrespective of differences. And of course that special relationship is dictated by geography. You don’t choose your neighbors. You may choose your friends, but you don’t choose your neighbors. And neighborliness presupposes a different volume of relations, which is not an abstract requirement but actually a requirement of day-to-day life of the people of neighboring countries.

And, actually, these requirements of life dictate the realities of life. And I would explain to you what I mean. With some of our neighbors, with the majority of them we have a very important trade relationship, very important for both countries. For some of these countries this relationship is even more important than it is for Belarus. For some of these countries, for example, 25 or 30 per cent of the turnover of their ports is originating from Belarus. For some of these countries 40 per cent of their railway turnover is originating in Belarus. This is a fact of life, which they cannot ignore, which their business communities cannot ignore, which their population cannot ignore. This provides jobs, profits, etc. in those countries, as well as in Belarus. So this is what you can term a “dictation of life”, as it were, to continue to have important substantial good neighborly relations irrespective of ideological or other differences. And we do hope that our neighbors will all continue to be guided by those special attitudes towards requirements of life between neighbors. We very much hope that they will not play games trying to pose as a small sub-regional superpower.

- I like that phrase.

- Belarus is in favor, to sum it up, of good neighborly relations with all its neighbors irrespective of whatever differences we may have on other issues.

- The next question sort of corresponds with I think what you were talking about some of the neighboring countries being part of alliances that may be getting their policy from elsewhere. What do you and other Belarusian diplomats tell the Western countries – the members of these alliances about their providing funding for non-governmental organizations such as pro-democracy and civil society organizations. Is Belarus content that all such funding is improper and interferes in Belarus’ internal affairs or do you regard it as legitimate under certain conditions?

- Well, actually, what we tell our partners is very simple. We tell them the Belarusian legislation on that was actually inspired if not copied from their own legislation. Legislation of any decent country prohibits foreign funding of political activities. If you would check the United States federal law on elections, you would see there a very clear-cut prohibition of any direct or indirect foreign contributions, donations or guidance related to any electoral activities at any level, or any contributions, again direct or indirect, to political parties, committees of such parties, etc. So, basically, what we have in our legislation is what the United Sates has in its legislation. It is also what coincides or is reflective of recommendations which were prepared in the Council of Europe about the funding of political parties, which also clearly prohibits foreign financing of political parties.

Now, if a non-governmental organization is having transparent activities on the territory of Belarus which fully respects the Belarusian laws and which goal and nature is acceptable to the Belarusian state, it’s welcome to work. If the goals are inimical to that, then they are unwelcome guests. But this is also something which other countries including the United States have in their legislation.

- Well, if I may follow up on that. So it’s you contention that some of the organizations in Belarus that have been receiving foreign funding are essentially acting as political parties, even if they are not political parties in name?

- Yes. They engage in political activities, in the electoral and pre-electoral activities, which is very difficult to differentiate from activities of political parties. And, unfortunately, they are financed by foreign entities, they do publicly recognize that they are financed by foreign entities, and they are trained and guided by foreign entities, which, as I said, no decent country could agree to.

- Well, Belarus is a member of the OSCE, but it often appears to be at odds with the OSCE. Does Belarus intend to remain a member of the OSCE and/or try to push for changes in how the organization operates?

- Well, there is a wrong assumption in what you stated in the beginning of your question. You said Belarus is at odds with the OSCE. Belarus cannot be at odds with the OSCE, because the OSCE is us. Belarus is a full member of the OSCE. So we can talk about certain differences within the OSCE.

- With other member countries.

- With other member countries, but not between Belarus and the OSCE. And this is very important. This is not an esoteric statement, this is a very important political statement. We are OSCE.

Now, Belarus, being part of OSCE, does not plan to quit the organization, because we believe this is an important organization, which has an important mission and a unique composition and mandate. This is the only pan-European organization. So it has to continue. In our view, it has to be strengthened. We strongly believe that this organization should have its own charter, its own rules of procedures, and be a more meaningful organization than it is so far.

Now we quite often are critical of OSCE functioning as it is now. And there are several areas where we insist on OSCE reform. I would also mention that, I believe, Belarus is one of the players in OSCE with very strong views on that. And I would add our views, which we have been holding for a number of years already are more and more widely accepted within OSCE by our friendly countries, and neighboring countries, for that matter.

Now, areas where we would like OSCE to change itself.

First, OSCE needs to change geographic imbalance in its activities. Because if you would look at what OSCE does, obviously, part of its activities is concentrated almost wholly to the East of Vienna, which in our view is not right. Usually this is a mandate, which relates to political issues and human rights issues, etc. But we do believe that there are ample and important tasks in the same basket, which relate to the West of Vienna. So this has to be corrected.

The second imbalance which has to be remedied in OSCE is functional imbalance. In our view, way too important share is concentrated on issues, which I mentioned. And too little attention is devoted in OSCE to such issues of the overriding importance as economic and ecological issues, and military security issues. We do not stand for eliminating the importance of the so called “third basket”, which is political issues, issues of protection of rights, etc. This is a very important basket. Our country pays a lot of importance to this basket. But there has to be a different balance in that, because economic and ecological issues relate to what is quite often termed as “new threats” in Europe. So there has to be much more balance in that.

And, finally, an important element of the OSCE everyday role is monitoring the electoral activities in different states. Right now we are hosting a very large OSCE monitoring mission in Belarus, which we have invited in an open and friendly manner. But we believe that methods which are employed in such activities are not only outdated, but they are not objective. They do not provide for an objective assessment of elections. Therefore we insist on reforming this part of OSCE activities too. We have stated a couple of years ago that without a deep reform OSCE as an organization will not have the important future we wish it to have.

- Could you expand on your criticism of specifically how the OSCE’s election monitoring methods are outdated or not objective?

- Well, they are not objective in many-many ways. I would give examples.

For example, forming OSCE observation missions. We never ever have in the long-term part of OSCE observation mission representatives of neighboring countries, who know our political system well, who understand it much better that representative of other countries. We deem this unnatural, strange and unacceptable.

Then, until very recently, the composition of missions, both long-term and short-term, was heavily dominated by several countries, by very few countries, which is also not right.

Now then the criteria of selection of observers. In our view, it is preposterous when selecting observers for Belarus to have as a prerequisite the knowledge of the English language. We don’t speck English her in this country. We speak Belarusian and Russian. So how the criterion should be English speaking? It should be Russian or Belarusian speaking, probably.

And, then, another issue is who takes the decision which election has to be observed and which election has not to be observed? Why OSCE sends 25 monitors to the United States, where the election was heavily contested and criticized? And why OSCE sends 600 observers to Belarus, which is 50 times smaller than the United States? No answer to that. Who takes the decision on what should be the verdict on a particular election? Who discusses that? Nobody discusses that. And this is not right. So these kind of things need to be changed. We made our views known in the OSCE, and we will continue to insist on that, along with our allies.

- This point well taken in the United States, especially in light of the 2000 elections, when the candidate who had fewer votes won.

- Exactly. One of the major criteria of the OSCE concerning elections is direct elections. The United States does not have direct elections, I mean presidential elections. This relates to what you have mentioned.

- Moving on. President Lukashenko a couple of weeks ago, when he was speaking to one of the military academies, made some statements about how Western countries are encouraging the young people of Belarus to be selfish, to value their own convenience and pleasure more than value patriotism and working for the development of Belarus. That’s a criticism that is often made of Western countries from many different angles. But I wondered, do you think that there are somehow basic philosophical differences between how Western countries approach life philosophy, differences between Belarus and the West?

- What President Lukashenko told the young audience you mentioned is actually exactly what President Kennedy once told a mass audience. He said, President Kennedy said, “Don’t ask the country what it can do for you. Ask yourself what you can do for your country”. That was exactly the message of President Lukashenko to young students of the military academy.

So this, in my view, reveals exactly, that there is no clash of fundamental philosophies between our two countries. There is no such thing as a “clash of civilizations” between Belarus and the West. The values, the principles are the same. Now, the application of those values and principles could be different and should be different. It ought to be different, because we are different countries and different nations. And one country should respect another country’s right to apply those values in its own way.

Last year, when President Lukashenko spoke at the General Assembly of the United Nations, he proposed an initiative that the United Nations should recognize the principle of diversity of ways of progressive development. That means there is no one single recipe, which is applicable to each and every country in the world how it should evolve and develop. Every country, as long as it respects the basic United Nations Charter principles, is and should be entitled to its own particular way of progressive development, which corresponds to its history, its nature, its geography, its psychology, whatever, its economy. So our proposal is to recognize the diversity of ways of progressive development of states. And I believe this is an important element of pluralism internationally, political pluralism internationally.

- Regarding the Sunday’s election, there has already been a great deal of criticism of the election preparations from the West. And judging by how the previous elections in CIS nations have gone over the past couple of years, there is probably going to be similar criticism after the election. What’s Belarus’ response to these complaints? Do you believe the West is prejudging the elections before they happen?

- I will start with the latter part of your question. Obviously, and a matter of fact, the West prejudges the nature of elections, so to say. The election is not over yet. It is going to be held on Sunday. But the verdict is already on the red in Washington and Brussels. And this is wrong. We cannot agree to that. This is a clear prejudgment of an event.

Secondly, you mentioned that the elections in all CIS countries were not deemed as appropriate, whatever. But we believe that the instrument, the tool of measuring of those elections, as I mentioned to you in another question, is a flawed instrument so far. It has to be changed.

And, thirdly, concerning the upcoming elections, it’s an open secret, and everybody knows, be it in Minsk, Washington, Brussels, Rome, that the current President, the incumbent President enjoys overwhelming support of the society in this country. And I believe one of your, at least one of your colleges in a United Kingdom newspaper put it right, when he said, “do you expect a President who increased real incomes in his country by 24 per cent in one year, who battled down inflation, who increased GNP several times over a five years, would you expect such a leader to lose an election? Never, ever, ever.

So this is the answer to the criticism.

- So, the 6 per cent economic growth that Belarus had last year, is certainly the envy of the United States and much of the West.

- It was not 6, it was 9,5. And we had a consistent growth of these proportions for 8 years in a row. Belarus is the first country from among the former Soviet Union countries, which broke through the level of GNP of 1990, which is the pre-Soviet Union collapse level.

- Really, Belarus was the first?

- It was the first. We are the first who went to do that. Belarus, even though we don’t have oil or gas with skyrocketing prices, we have the highest pensions in CIS. We have the highest students’ stipend in CIS. We have the highest GNP ratio spent for education and health services. The real income of the population grows by at least 15 per cent annually in the last five years.

So, the Government and the President work for the people. The people see that, they feel it and they appreciate it. And that’s the answer to your question.

- My next question I think actually goes back to some extent what we were talking about earlier. The United States and some other Western countries are threatening vague unspecified punitive actions against Belarus, if the election comes under question. Does Belarus worry that such actions might leave it isolated or economically weakened, or is the importance of Belarus economically to its neighboring countries such that these punitive actions would not have much effect?

- First of all, we strongly believe that sanctions as such and economic sanctions in particular do not solve problems. And there is ample evidence to that, worldwide.

Secondly, we don’t believe that economic sanctions, which are applied for achieving political goals, have a nice kind of “smell”. They don’t.

Thirdly, it’s a double-edge sward. I mentioned to you that neighboring countries are very closely linked with the Belarusian economy. Probably they may suffer more than we will suffer.

Also, specific business people, companies, firms, societies will also suffer losing trade with Belarus, because our trade with countries in Europe is more than 10 bln dollars. So this is 10 bln dollars, which someone is going to lose. They’ll make nobody happy, neither here, nor there.

Next, of course, the European Union accounts for 44 per cent in our exports. 44 per cent. That means if sanctions come, then each and every Belarusian family will lose part of its income. Will they say “thank you” to Brussels and Washington for that? They surely will not. They will say other things about that. Are the European Union and the United States interested in that?

I don’t think so. I hope they are not interested in that.

And, finally, what we sell to the European Union and to the West as a whole is things which are competitive. Otherwise they would not have been bought. So if they are competitive in Europe and in the United States, you will believe me, that they are competitive anywhere in the world.

- So you are saying that Belarus can seek other markets for the same goods?

- Western Europe is a highly competitive market. If they are successful there, we can be successful anywhere. So, the logic and the road of sanctions and punitive action is a dead-end road. It’s a dead alley.

- One last question. I have asked you enough about the elections and democracy questions. I’d be interested in knowing a broader view about what is Belarus’ general foreign policy goals, and what you see as Belarus’ place in the world, as you are a comparatively small country, what role do you see Belarus is playing?

- The role we see for Belarus’ foreign policy and for Belarus at large is basically same for foreign policy of any country. First and above all we have to secure through diplomatic means the security of the country.

Secondly, we have to create favorable external conditions for our trade and development. Now in looking after those goals we of course are guided by how we perceive the role of Belarus. Belarus is a medium-size European country with an important economic potential. We are a manufacturing country, and we are a country which is dependent on foreign trade. And we are a very open economy. Our ratio between the volume of foreign trade and GNP, which is an indicator of openness of an economy, is one of the top 10 ratios in Europe. We are a very open economy. Therefore we are interested in making sure that there is an unhindered access of and flow of goods throughout Europe and other countries worldwide.

We are not a country with global ambitions politically. But we are a country which would like to protect its economic interests worldwide, to be present in the world markets everywhere, in as much as we can. And we are working for that in markets not only like European market, but also in markets like China, South-East Asia, South of Africa, Latin America, and other markets. This is our goal and this is what we do. And, eventually, even though we are not a player with global ambitions, being a mid-size country we are interested in an international set-up, which will be able to protect the interests of countries like us. And that means we are interested in a multi-polar world. The unipolar world does not protect countries like ours. So in that sense we are also playing with other like-minded countries worldwide to achieve that goal of a multipolar world.

And, coming back to your first question, of course, good neighborliness is one of our top priorities in foreign policies.