Posted on 02/27/2005 9:20:45 AM PST by lizol
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia The popular uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine have raised the morale of the small opposition movements in Belarus and Moldova, and they said Wednesday that they were more determined than ever to continue the struggle for democracy. . "It will take time, but it will come," said Andrei Safonov, a political analyst and journalist from Transnistria, a separatist and internationally unrecognized enclave in eastern Moldova that is ruled by an authoritarian group backed by Moscow. . Civil society groups attending a conference in Bratislava on Wednesday, the day before President George W. Bush was to meet with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, said they had learned a huge amount from the movements that had peacefully overthrown authoritarian regimes in Slovakia, Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. . A crucial lesson, they said, was in using the Internet as a powerful tool to defeat state-controlled media. . The conference, organized by the German Marshall Fund of the United States along with the Slovak Foreign Policy Association and the Institute for Public Affairs, tried to analyze how the experiences from those nonviolent uprisings influenced each other. . Although civil society groups from Belarus and Moldova said they had no illusions about what it would take to organize movements and a clandestine information system to coordinate the opposition, they were increasingly confident that democracy would succeed, despite Russia's attempts to prevent it. . "If it can happen in Georgia and Ukraine, then it can happen in Belarus," said Irina Krasovskaya, president of We Remember Foundation, which she established in Belarus in 1999 after her husband, Anatoly Krasovsky, and the vice president of Parliament, Victor Gonchar, disappeared. They have never been found. .
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
You heard about new Lukashenko’s idea? Very high taxes for opposition if they are supported financially by foreign organizations. Of course this is impossible to support them thanks to their domestic cash because of his regime. He said with irony that he only repeating American way.
It wasn't me. Some troll???
From the caves of Blogistan come the triumphant guerillas.
The smugger they are the harder they fall--just ask Dan Rather.
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