Aliaksandr Milinkievich’s speech at the EPP congress

Dear friends!

Together with my Belarusian colleagues, I’m very glad to be here among you in Bonn at the congress of the largest European political family.

First of all, I would like to express my words of congratulation and great satisfaction with the fact that the Lisbon Treaty has finally come into effect. I hope very much that – together with significant internal reforms – the changes envisaged by the Lisbon Treaty would increase the weight and importance of the European Union of 27 countries at the global stage. We all would like the European Union to play a more active and powerful role speaking in a single voice in our part of Europe.

I’d like to use this opportunity to say a few words about the present state of relations between Belarus and the EU.

A year ago, I expressed direct support for the new EU strategy in relations with our country – namely, the replacement of the isolation of Belarus by the conditional dialogue. My country has no positive alternative to the policy of the step-by-step rapprochement with the EU.

Belarusian authoritarian regime began some reforms in the economy in this period; however, democratization processes are of superficial and cosmetic nature. Belarusian authorities wouldn’t voluntarily perform political liberalization – they like the Chinese model. Any attempt to find the compromise and the absence of consistent and firm position would be interpreted by them as the sign of weakness and as concession.

I was very worried when I knew that three weeks ago the European Parliament didn’t include the resolution on the situation in Belarus in its plenary session. Also, it’s a pity that the Italian prime-minister’s visit to Minsk took place without any notice of the human rights problems and without any meetings with the civil society representatives. We, in Belarus, think that his declarations that Belarusian elections allegedly reflect the corresponding level of support of the Belarusian dictator are a big political mistake.

The absence of the public evaluation of the situation in my country poses the risk of decrease in trust on the part of the Belarusian democratic community to our European partners in promotion of the European values in Belarus. I’m very glad that the European People’s Party will pass its resolution on the situation in Belarus.

Today, the fate of democracy in Belarus depends on the coordinated activity of the Belarusian civil society and the united Europe. It’s very important that the EU continues to meticulously defend moral standards when implementing the policy of dialogue with our country. Likewise, it’s very important to define precise landmarks and criteria of development of relations between the EU and Belarus.

The European economic support should be conditioned by real political changes – not by their imitation as was in the case of the recent sterile amendments to the Election Code.

In the recent period, the repressive system which continues to exist in Belarus was used to increase the pressure on the democratic activists: administrative arrests several days long, intimidation of the Belarusian Christian Democracy party founders, expulsion of a successful student from a state university based purely on political motives due to her participation in the Civil Society Forum in Brussels, and political kidnappings of the youth leaders.

I’m sure that our cooperation in the name of the democratic and European future of my country would yield significant results and would allow Belarusians to join the common European family.

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