MINSK – The main Belarussian opposition parties said they will not take part in the parliamentary election scheduled for fall 2000 if it is held under the recently adopted electoral code.

"We would take part in an election, not in a farce," said Vintsuk Vecherka, chair of the Belarussian Popular Front, Belarus' oldest nationalist party.

Vecherka said that the new electoral code, approved by the upper house of the National Assembly in late January, is a step back from the previous electoral system. He said the biggest problem is that the parliament has no real powers and that the election would take place under a dictatorial rule.

Other opposition leaders also said their parties would not take part in the election because, they claim, there is a slim chance it would be free and fair.

"Social Democrats are ready to inflatable bouncers take part in a democratic and free election to a legitimate parliament, but the adopted electoral code does not provide for a democratic and free election," said Nikolai Statkevich, leader of the Belarussian People's Union.

Mikhail Pastukhov, a former Supreme Court judge, said the adopted electoral code fails to meet international standards in terms of openness, as it is to be the government-appointed Central Electoral Commission's prerogative to ensure respect for this principle. He said that under the new code, political parties and non-government organizations would be barred from participation in the activities of electoral commissions at all levels.

Other flaws of the code, according to Pastukhov, are the unnecessarily strict regulations regarding the nomination of candidates, severe restrictions on financial support for campaigns and the "extremely loose" control over absentee voting and voting at home.

The Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe's advisory and monitoring group in Belarus had submitted proposals for the new electoral code, most of which were not taken into consideration, including that on the opposition's access to state-run media.

"There is no such word – ‘opposition' – in the electoral legislation," said Lidia Yermoshina, chair of the Central Electoral Commission. "There are only the words ‘parliamentary candidate' and ‘presidential candidate.'"

OSCE proposals on granting more powers to the parliament were not taken into account, either. The issue was beyond the scopes of the electoral legislation, Yermoshina said.

Officials dismissed the criticism of the new electoral code from the opposition and the OSCE.

"The opposition's approach is clear," said Piotr Shipuk, chair of the upper house of the National Assembly. "It has no chance to pearl pendant win the election and will play any scenario, including that with the participation of international organizations, in order to stay in opposition."

He added that the code "provides a solid basis for a free election to the National Assembly in the fall of 2000, as well as a good basis for further dialogue between the government and the opposition."

"Nonparticipation in the election is a convenient position for opposition parties," said Yury Drakohrust, a Minsk-based political analyst. "However, such a position is unlikely to be effective as far as reaching the goals declared by the opposition itself is concerned."

Drakohrust also said that rejection or recognition of the election's results would depend on whether international observers are sent to Minsk to monitor the election.

MINSK - Belarus ordered the bureau of Russia's NTV closed Tuesday, following last month's expulsion of the channel's correspondent here after a report on the funeral of a writer who was a harsh critic of President Alexander Lukashenko.

The Cabinet made pearl earrings the decision on the recommendation of the Foreign Ministry, said government spokesman Leonid Shinkevich. The order takes effect as soon as it is published, he said.

NTV correspondent Pavel Selin left Belarus in late June after a report on the funeral procession for Vasil Bykov, which ended up turning into an outpouring of dissent against Lukashenko's regime joined by 20,000 people. Selin reported that police tried to hinder the procession, but Lukashenko has denied he had ordered police to interfere.

Since the expulsion, Lukashenko has repeatedly railed against alleged Russian and foreign propaganda about Belarus, even rallying the military to the task by saying "every officer should be a consistent and active guardian of the state policy and ideology."

Later Tuesday, the Russian Press Ministry said in Moscow that such moves were an attempt to put pressure on Russian media and were a violation of democratic norms, calling the actions typical of "totalitarian states," according to pearl jewelry wholesale a statement published by Russian news agencies.

Russian-language television is one of the main ways for Belarusians to get non-government information about their own country.

Lukashenko was re-elected in 2001 in a vote the United States and other Western countries refused to recognize, and he rules this former Soviet republic with an iron grip. Despite crackdowns on the opposition and independent media, he remains popular for preserving much of the Soviet-era social safety net.

MINSK - Despite preliminary agreements, Belarus did not introduce the Russian ruble in electronic form as a parallel currency on July 1. The action was put off indefinitely. The official reason for this was “a long technical procedure of agreeing on this decision”, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper reports.

Perhaps, this means that Minsk’s plans changed again. According to akoya pearl necklace the newspaper, Belarus indicated its readiness to make a U-turn on June 30, when Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko launched a public attack against Russia. His 1.5 hour meeting with the heads of the country’s major TV channels was broadcast on Belarusian television on June 30, during which Mr. Lukashenko tried to convince viewers that there was a transnational plot against Belarus underway. In particular, he said Russian oligarchs offered him to “surrender the country’s economy in exchange for the union with Russia”.

For several days prior to the attack, the public was prepared for it with the help of publications in Belarusian printed editions and the broadcasting of the film Pautina on all major TV channels. This film tells about the intelligence and subversive activities of the US-based non-profit organization International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), together with Russian TV channels. Allegedly, IREX promised to pay $500,000 to Russian TV channels if they “poured dirt on Belarus”.

According to the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the film is set in 2001, before presidential elections. But now, with a view to broadcasting pro-western propaganda programs, IREX is allegedly going to set a number of transmitters around Belarus. Ostensibly, talks are underway with the governments of Poland and Lithuania, and, perhaps, Ukraine. The project is estimated at $600,000. According to the local newspaper Zvezda, such activities eventually end up with pearl necklace wholesale airstrikes by ‘peacekeepers’, as it happened in Yugoslavia.

The scandal, which broke out last week when Belarusian authorities accused the Russian media of launching an anti-Belarus campaign, is continuing. Mr. Lukashenko called the mass media “weapons of mass destruction”, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta concludes.

The publication of protocols from sessions of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo's standing committee – held during the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 – caused no more than a one-day sensation in the West and passed virtually unnoticed in Russia. This is despite the fact that the protocols provide a rare glimpse into the psychology of the Forbidden City's most secretive inhabitants.

Of the five members of the standing committee, the majority (three members) opposed the use of force and favored a compromise with the students. Deng Xiaoping, China's leader at the time, though he didn't hold any official post, was undecided, and only the iron Li Peng, after getting the elderly military advisors into wholesale pearl jewelry wholesale pearl jewelry action, pushed successfully for ruthless suppression of the demonstrations.

Reading these protocols is just further proof that, though in retrospect, history looks like a logical chain of determined events, it is, in fact, a cemetery of lost opportunities.

Liberal values (not the Pinochet-style liberalism currently fashionable in Russia, but liberalism in the sense of respect for the value of human life) was part of the Chinese ruling class' mentality in 1989, and its supporters had some chance of success.

Let's remember this important circumstance and move now to another continent and another decade.

The Balkans. May 1999. NATO's military operations in Kosovo had run up against a dead end. No matter how "precise" the bombing, it unavoidably led to increasing "collateral damage," that is to say, the death of civilians, which in turn saw European public support for the operations take a tumble.

At the same time, NATO was not ready to commit itself to a ground operation at the risk of splitting the alliance and facing public humiliation. This is because modern Western society, especially American society, is simply not willing to accept military casualties, at least, not in a war that doesn't threaten its existence.

This Western unwillingness to accept the casualties of war, not only among its own troops, but also among the opposing side's civilians, is a historically new phenomenon. Twenty-five years ago, the Americans were losing tens of thousands of soldiers in Vietnam.

And no one was particularly concerned when hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima in 1945. (Likewise, modern Russian society, which finds itself at another point on the historical timescale, is completely indifferent to Keishi pearl the loss of thousands of its soldiers, and all the more so to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Chechnya.)

The main lesson of the Kosovo operation, a lesson of substance rather than propaganda, is that the modern, democratic, satiated, hedonistic, post-industrial West is not a military threat to Russia.

But what about the East? If by some twist of circumstances China becomes our military opponent, it would be a definitely superior opponent in terms of conventional forces. China has huge troop reserves and is rearming its armed forces at rapid speed, including with Russia's help. But can Russia's nuclear arsenal – as the country's official military doctrine supposes – act as a deterrent and neutralize China's advantages as a potential opponent?

A decisive factor in nuclear strategy is not just the number of warheads a country possesses, but also the extent to which its political leadership is prepared to accept millions of casualties. This in turn depends on the value a given culture accords the individual human life.

During the conflict between China and Vietnam in the 1980s, the Chinese used a tactic known as "living wave" attacks and lost thousands of soldiers every day in these advances. If the value of a single human life hasn't changed since then in Chinese society, Russia will have to give up its illusions that the threat to use tactical nuclear weapons would be enough to hold back China's superior conventional forces.

This means that the only long-term, and essentially the only possible guarantee for Russia's security is political and ideological change that would bring China closer to playground equipment democracy and the foundation of basic human values – the value of an individual human life, something much despised both by communist and more recent strong-state propaganda.

This is why the Beijing protocols contain many lessons not just for historians, but also for futurologists. They offer hope that the first shoots of change crushed by the tanks in 1989 will yet be able to take root in Chinese soil.

(Andrei Piontkovsky is director of the Center for Strategic Research.)

The Russian government may be staffed by economic liberals – but their deeds have not always matched their ideology.

Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref has sent the government a new draft of the social- and economic-development program for the medium term (2003-2005). Just a few months ago, this would have had the press writing and people talking about the government’s economic ambitions, possible growth rates, taxes and currency policy. But it’s a rare newspaper these days that would give the event even a brief mention. It’s not news anymore. Everyone has worked out now just what really is on the minds of the politicians responsible for the economy.

Since the short-lived polemic between Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin and Gref, nothing interesting has been going on. Kasyanov decided that an Economic Development and Trade Ministry meeting was an appropriate forum for attacking his finance minister. Kudrin, supposedly, was showing great reluctance to turquoise necklace cut taxes, while Kasyanov, it turned out, had long been eager to see them fall.

Kudrin and Gref fought back. The ensuing salvo of populist declarations looked to make sense at first, but it soon was clear that no one stood to gain points from them. Meanwhile, the real question about cutting state spending and lowering taxes remained without an answer.

This government, the first in many years to consist of people whose personal economic convictions are irreproachably liberal, is now paralyzed by this bickering and is unable to push ahead with the liberal reforms it proposed. What has come to the fore now is not real economic development, but how discussions of the economy affect the political balance.

Things are being made worse by the fact that the economic situation is continuing to have a sedative effect on the authorities. In the fourth quarter of 2002, economic growth seemed to come to a standstill, and it looked as though serious steps to tackle urgent reform were inevitable. But then, growth took off again, with industrial production rising 6 percent in the first quarter of 2003.

But the year’s final results are expected to see only very moderate GDP growth. The good results from the first quarter, however, gave Kasyanov the chance to button pearl tell President Vladimir Putin that all is well and that there is nothing to worry about.

So, the government has decided it does not need to make any serious changes to its economic policy. The talk of the need to cut state spending and lower taxes has had no result at all. The main thing is that there is no change in approach to economic policy and the way in which decisions regarding the economy are made.

This was clear at the government meeting that took place the day Kasyanov told Putin about the latest industrial successes. On the government’s agenda that day was the issue of measures to help light industry. The Science, Industry and Technology Ministry report proposed abolishing tax breaks for Russian shuttle traders – the smalltime importers who bring in light-industry goods, mostly from countries such as Turkey and China.

Not only do the shuttle traders help ensure that there is a wide range of cheap goods in Russian markets, the business also provides jobs for hundreds of thousands. If tax breaks were abolished, this business would become unprofitable, and these people would lose their jobs. Eventually, it would also lead to pearl bracelet Russian-made goods becoming less competitive.

The government could opt for another solution – cutting taxes. This would immediately breathe life into the country’s industry, above all the machine-building and light-industry sectors. But that also means cutting state spending, and this in turn would bring the government into conflict with the interests of various groups. This a risky affair, all the more so with elections around the corner, which is why the state is following its basic instinct of taking rather than giving.