U.S., Belarus Dispute Intensifies
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. State Department is considering whether to force Belarus to close its embassy in retaliation for the former Soviet Republic’s expulsion of 10 American diplomats in an escalating dispute, officials said yesterday.
Officials were also weighing whether to close the American Embassy in Minsk after the ejection of the American diplomats this week, which spokesman Tom Casey denounced as a “unwarranted and unjustified.”
The two countries have been taking steps against each other since President Lukashenko’s Belarusian government began jailing protesters after widely criticized elections in March 2006.
The American ambassador departed in March; with the latest steps, there now are only four American diplomats in Belarus and six Belarusian diplomats in that country’s missions in Washington and New York.
“We are considering the full range of options in terms of our respective diplomatic presences,” Mr. Casey said, charging that Belarus’s actions were “solely as a result of the United States’s support for democracy and human-rights activists.
“There are probably some other shoes that’ll drop in this process,” he said.
State Department officials in Washington summoned Belarusian diplomats yesterday to tell them about the steps being considered. An American official in Minsk visited the foreign minister to convey the same message. “This is not an idle threat,” an American diplomat said.
Closure of Belarus’s embassy would be a highly unusual step. But Mr. Lukashenko’s government has been denounced often by Americans and Europeans as a Stalinist remnant, and Secretary of State Rice has called the country Europe’s last “outpost of tyranny.”
Belarus contends its human-rights record is no worse than that of America.
American and European Union officials, who have charged that Mr. Lukashenko manipulated the 2006 election to retain power, have banned him and other top officials from entering their countries.
In November, the Americans froze the American assets of a large petroleum processing company that is thought to be controlled by Mr. Lukashenko.
American officials have said that they would reconsider their stance toward Belarus if the country released jailed opposition leader Alexander Kozulin, but Belarus has refused.
