Sikorski offers Lukashenka stick and carrot

Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has forwarded a letter to the Belarusian dictator through the head of the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, Syarhei Martynau.

Today «Gazeta Wyborcza» (Poland) has published a newspaper “Letter to Lukashenka”. According to the newspaper, the letter contains 10 parts, and Warsaw is to that this support them only come in Belarus respects the rights of the Polish minority. The matter concerns among other things, supporting Belarus in issues of receiving a new loan from the IMF, and lifting visa sanctions, beginning of some parts of the Eastern Partnership Program, and even “Belarus’ joining the Council of Baltic States as a full member”.

Gazeta Wyborcza also writes that the Foreign Ministry of Poland is preparing a list of Belarusian citizens for whom entry to Poland and the entire territory of the European Union is to be banned. Unofficially it is informed that the leader of the pro-regime union of Poles headed by Stanislau Syamashka, is blacklisted.

“The term of publishing this list is a matter of hours and days, not weeks,” stated Pyotr Paszkowski, a spokesperson of the Polish FM.

According to the newspaper, during the talks in Warsaw which were rather harsh, the head of the Belarusian Foreign Ministry Martynau said that “rights of the Poles in Belarus are not violated”.

“It is very hard to believe in that,” said a source from the Foreign Ministry of Poland to Gazeta Wyborcza. “Just yesterday Belarusian police detained a deputy chairman of the Union of Poles in Belarus Myachyslau Yaskevich. The grounds for that an allegedly fake driver’s licence. In the evening he was released, it turned out his driver’s licence was legal”.

Meanwhile, yesterday EU Parliament President Jerzy Buzek, a former Polish prime minster, stated that he “does not exclude breaking off relations between the EU and Belarus, in case violations of human rights continue. If there is no positive response to the thaw offered by the EU, radical measures should be used”.

As informed by the Polish TV channel TVN24, Lech Kaczynski, President of Poland, commenting the situation with the Union of Poles in Belarus, said that the policy of concessions to Lukashenka yielded no results.

The Chancellery of the President of Poland has informed that in the near future Lech Kaczynski wants to meet with the leader of the Union of Poles in Belarus Andzelika Borys. The President has also expressed solidarity with the Poles in Belarus, who, as the office of the President notes, are still subjected to “unjustified repressions”.

«Rzeczpospolita» newspaper (Poland) in an article “Belarus has heard conditions” also writes that Radoslaw Sikorski, Foreign Minister of Poland, has announced the conditions to the Belarusian authorities under which Poland would help Belarus in developing relations with the EU.

The situation has been commented by a member of the European Parliament Konrad Szymański: “The aim of the meeting with Syarhei Martynau hasn’t been achieved. In the moment when Poles in Belarus are suffering from crackdown, the government of Poland signs an agreement with Minsk on near-border movement. During the visit of Martynau to Warsaw police arrested a deputy chairman of the Union of Poles in Belarus Myachyslau Yaskevich. It is an obvious provocation, which was to receive a harsh evaluation of the Polish side. Instead of that, the Belarusian authorities have received a signal of permissiveness. If minister Sikorski planned to have a “man-to-man” conversation with the head of the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, he has failed to do so… The government must make more clear signals to Minsk, and the conversation with Belarus must be cool and concrete”.

A popular Polish portal nadblog-wszystkich-blogowl.onet.pl in an article “Radoslaw Sikorski threatens Lukashenka” writes: “Sikorski told the head of the Belarusian diplomacy Syarhei Martynau about two ways of possible development of relations with Belarus: a positive scenario – in case the authorities recognize the Union of Poles in Belarus, and the second is certainly sanctions”. The author of the critique writes that “we (Poles) need close relations with Belarus, as our national hero, Tadevush Kastsyuska (Tadeusz Kościuszko), was a native of Belarus. Sikorski has warned Lukashenka. What will be the result of that?”