23 October 2007
The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenka, has been criticized for a statement qualified by observers as anti-Semitic. Talking to a group of Russian journalists about the past living conditions of the southeastern town of Babruysk, Lukashenka said, "It was scary to enter, it was a pigsty. That was mainly a Jewish town - and you know how Jews treat the place where they are living."
"Look at Israel, I've been [there]. I really don't want to offend anyone - but they don't care much about, say, grass being cut, like in Moscow," Lukashenka said, in comments broadcast live on national radio. The authoritarian leader of the former Soviet republic also called on Jews "with money" to return to Babruysk, once a thriving Jewish center. Israeli officials and Jewish organizations within Belarus have condemned Lukashenka's comments, which have raised questions about the rise of anti-Semitism in Belarus.
"In Belarusian and Russian societies, anti-Semitism is evident every day. Lukashenka wanted to demonstrate that he was one of them, a representative of this segment of the population," the political commentator Valery Karbalevitch was quoted by "Radio Free Europe" as saying. Israel's ambassador to Belarus, Zeev Ben-Ari, told the news service that Lukashenka had been drawing on an old, derogatory anti-Semitic stereotype. His speech "alluded to the myth that I thought had died, at least among the progressive part of humanity," Ben-Ari said. "This myth sees the Jews as untidy and dirty people who smell bad - and is undoubtedly anti-Semitic." Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni said in a statement that "the role of leadership is to fight anti-Semitism wherever it raises its ugly head, all over the world, not to encourage it."
The president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Rene van der Linden, said Lukashenka's anti-Semitic remarks "verge on the absurd, but they are no less unacceptable for it."
