While European Union leaders fret about whether to shake hands with Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s authoritarian president since 1994, the wily 54-year-old leader himself stole a march on his critics on Monday by popping up in, of all places, the Vatican for talks with Pope Benedict XVI. What’s more, he was due later on to be welcomed for dinner by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister.
This is Lukashenko’s first official visit to a western European country since 1995 – although I am reliably informed that, since the EU suspended a travel ban on him last year, he may have made at least one private trip to western Europe. According to Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister, the purpose of no longer treating Lukashenko as a polecat is to encourage democratic reform in Belarus and the gradual acceptance of EU norms of behaviour.
There are other aims, of course. The main one is to keep alive the very idea of Belarusan independence and to stop Belarus from slipping completely into the clutches of Russia, which is the country to which Belarus is closest in economic, cultural and historical terms. EU policymakers are particularly keen that Lukashenko should not bow to Russian pressure to recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the two separatist Georgian enclaves whose “independence” Moscow proclaimed after its triumphant military campaign against Georgia last August.
These considerations explain why the EU has offered Lukashenko the opportunity to attend its “Eastern Partnership” summit in Prague on May 7, an event that will launch the bloc’s latest attempt at stabilising half a dozen ex-Soviet states situated between the EU’s eastern border and Russia. Will Lukashenko show up in Prague? It’s not clear. EU diplomats say there are doubts about the participation of both Lukashenko and President Vladimir Voronin of Moldova, where the recent post-election unrest has prompted EU criticism.
Meanwhile, the Vatican has no qualms at all about hosting Lukashenko. From its point of view, there is every reason to cultivate relations with the leader of Belarus, a country whose Roman Catholic minority is well-treated in terms of religious freedom and which, indeed, is growing steadily in influence. Democratic reform may have made modest progress in Belarus – that was my own assessment when I visited the country in February - but the Vatican’s contacts with Lukashenko show that the Holy See has distinctive foreign policy interests all its own.
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