Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was in Belarus this week for a one-day visit. He had negotiations with Belarusian President
Alexander Lukashenko. Both are unpopular in the West. And both are ruling states wich are not pure democracies.
The first thing Chavez was asked in Minsk is what contracts he brought with him from Moscow, and is it true that they worth $30 billion. "I do not engage in the perversions that various agencies spread," he told journalists. "Numbers like that are crazy! Better to ask me how much money we invested in the development of our country!"
For
Vadim Dovnar, journalist in Minsk, an answer like that is well within the limits of neither confirming nor denying, and Chavez decided not to return to the topic.
Kommersant says that Chavez took a keen interest in buying a large lot of Igla-S portable ballistic missile complexes (up to 2.500 of them). A Rosoboronexport spokesman told Kommersant said that "the Venezuelans expressed the intention of obtaining Iglas during the first round of our meetings in 2005, when questions of providing factories to make Kalashnikov machineguns, helicopters and fighter jets were also raised," the spokesman said. "However, we are not making an agreement on portable ballistic missiles, because of agreements with the United States on the nonproliferation of that type of weapon."
In spite of the fact that Chavez spent only one day in Minsk, Belarusian authorities tried to make it a memorable day for the Venezuelan leader. A square in Minsk was renamed in honor of Chavez' idol, South American revolutionary leader Simon Bolivar. Chavez was touched. Laying a wreath at a bas relief of the national hero of his country, Chavez promised to fight against the enemies of Belarus. "I have fallen in love with the Belarusian land, the Belarusian people, and I commit myself to being the friend of that people. We fight one enemy. We have to call it by name. It is American imperialism. We have won, we will win, but the battle will be long," he said.
An agreement on that was signed in 2007 during Lukashenko's visit to Caracas, and in April of this year the document was ratified by the Belarusian parliament. Under the agreement, Belarus will help its ally create a unified air defense system and radar defense facilities. And both will anger United States together, wich seems to be more important from time to time. During the past years Chávez has focused considerably on Venezuela's foreign relations via new bilateral and multilateral agreements, including
humanitarian aid and construction projects. Chávez has engaged, with varying degrees of success, numerous other foreign leaders, including
Argentina's
Néstor Kirchner,
China's
Hu Jintao,
Cuba's
Fidel Castro,
Iran's
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and
Russia's
Vladimir Putin.
Some critics of Lukashenko use the term
Lukashism (
lukashenkoism) to refer to the
political and
economic system Lukashenko has implemented in
Belarus. The term is also used more broadly to refer to an
authoritarian political ideology based on
cult of his personality and
nostalgia for
Soviet times among certain groups in Belarus. It is not known where the term was first used, though the earliest documented use was in 1998. In Venezuela population is divides about
Chavismo, a national discrace for some and the salvation for others.
By the way, Lukashenko has the The
José Martí Order (
Cuba, 2000)
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