Give war a chance

23.10.1999

...And it can do no good for the United States or NATO to see Russia once again humiliated. That result can only aggravate Russia's darker nationalist currents and distract it from more progressive tasks. The West has-or, at least, should have-a larger interest in a Russia that does better than slide miserably down the ladder of politicized corruption towards anarchy, even-as disaster piles on disaster-disintegration, all the while bristling with nuclear weapons...

Of muck and money

01.10.1999

Belarus: country with a history-sized hole in its imagination

01.10.1999

Why does Belarus seem to place so little value on the independence it won in 1991? Unlike other post-Soviet states such as Moldova or Georgia which have been plagued by violent ethnic strife since 1991, the problem does not seem to lie with ethnicity. A healthy majority of 78 per cent of the population of Belarus were ethnic Belarusians according to the last Soviet census in 1989, and there are no 'autonomous republics' or non-Belarusian territorial enclaves that might want to break away from Minsk. Only 13 percent of the population is actually Russian.