With EU states nearing agreement on relaxing Belarus sanctions on Monday (13 October), the man that Minsk hired to help do the job – British public relations magnate Lord Timothy Bell – tells EUobserver about unmaking the image of a dictator.
“The whole world is absolutely overwhelmed by an off-the-cuff remark by Condoleezza Rice, who as far as I know has neither met him nor been there,” Lord Bell said, on the US secretary of state’s 2006 bon mot – “the last dictatorship in Europe” – to describe Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime.
“When I go there, I mix perfectly happily with ordinary people. I see a country that has a perfectly nice atmosphere about it, people are very relaxed, people I talk to in hotels, bars and restaurants don’t keep looking over their shoulder. But it’s being described in the media in the way Ceausescu’s Romania was described.”
The Belarussian government hired the British peer – who once advised former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and today also represents anti-Kremlin exile Boris Berezovsky – in July to help persuade the EU to drop a visa ban list on Belarus top brass.
Lord Bell admits he has not made an effort to see what life is like outside central Minsk or to get to know the opposition. He also has not met with members of the nomenklatura such as Belarus KGB head Stepan Sukhorenko, implicated in some of the government’s worst acts of repression.
He says he is “not a spokesman for the country,” but is happy to report that “I have found them [Belarus authorities] to be very hospitable, very pleasant to be with. The media description of Belarus and its administration has absolutely no relation with reality in my experience.”
Lord Bell also made light of Belarus recent parliamentary elections, in which no opposition members got in amid OSCE allegations of vote-rigging, creating a stumbling block for the EU sanctions move. “I don’t think you measure the success of an election by the number of opposition candidates that are elected,” he said.
