OVER NEW YEAR'S weekend, a group of global leaders joined in a remarkable protest against the political crackdown underway in Belarus, a country sometimes dubbed Europe's last dictatorship. Former president George W. Bush, former Czech president Vaclav Havel and the senior Republican and Democratic members of the House Foreign Relations Committee were among those who participated in a special broadcast by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Each read some of the names of the 700 individuals detained by the regime of Alexander Lukashenko after a disputed Dec. 19 election.
The gesture offered some needed attention to a country whose holiday season crisis has yet to prompt an adequate reaction from the United States and other Western governments. Mr. Lukashenko's claim that he won reelection with nearly 80 percent of the vote was dismissed by international election monitors and by tens of thousands of protestors who gathered in the center of Minsk. The regime responded by attacking the crowd, and it has since rounded up scores of journalists, artists and opposition activists. Five of the nine presidential candidates who ran against Mr. Lukashenko, along with at least 17 other opposition leaders, have been charged with organizing mass unrest and face prison sentences of up to 15 years.
Mr. Lukashenko's coup instantly reversed what some saw as a creep toward political liberalization and greater independence from Russia, which has been trying to bind Belarus into a new, autocratic union.
We shall see how the administration's objective of a "reset" in relations with Russia squares with a blatant crackdown by this mini-USSR, which Moscow would love to recover for the motherland.
