[Previous entry: "India: The terrible price paid for economic progress"] [Next entry: "The Coming Resource Wars"]

03/11/2006:

"Europe and the US decide the winner before the vote"

Would you expect a European leader who has presided over a continual increase in real wages for several years, culminating in a 24% rise over the past 12 months, to be voted out of office? What if he has also cut VAT, brought down inflation, halved the number of people in poverty in the past seven years, and avoided social tensions by maintaining the fairest distribution of incomes of any country in the region?

Of course not, you would say. In Bill Clinton's famous phrase, "it's the economy, stupid". Unless there are overriding issues of political or personal insecurity - incipient civil war, ethnic cleansing, mass arrests, pervasive crime on the streets - most people will vote according to their pocketbooks. And so it is likely to be in Belarus in nine days' time.
Why, then, are western governments, echoed by most western media, developing a crescendo of one-sided reporting and comment on one of Europe's smallest countries? Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, last year called it an "outpost of tyranny". Stephen Hadley, the US national security adviser, recently complained that "there is not enough outrage and international attention on Belarus". As if on cue, we now have thundering editorials and loaded reports in America and Europe claiming the imminent election is a farce and the regime deeply unpopular.

We saw similar conformism little more than a year ago in Ukraine, when one side was glorified to the skies, as if only a tiny minority of benighted Sovietera automatons did not support the pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. His opponent actually got 44% of the vote, and may even emerge with the highest number of votes in Ukraine's parliamentary elections in two weeks.
guardian.co.uk

why? My guess would be...pipeline between Black Sea and Baltic Sea.