Amerikanka

[Silurian]

Meanwile in Europe

Andrei Sannikov has been kept hidden from the public for 10 weeks. He is one of two presidential candidates still being held incommunicado inside Amerikanka (the other is Nikolai Statkevich). Mr Sannikov, a 57-year-old former diplomat, is one of the most prominent opposition leaders to have been arrested during the 19 December protests and was beaten by riot police as they retook the square. His wife, the investigative journalist Irina Khalip, is under house arrest and there are two KGB agents stationed in her flat.

By Jerome Taylor in the Independent

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&so...e58a08&usg=AFQjCNHPq08tM25r1R76moLfSw86rgz_kg


http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...e-distracted-from-this-brutality-2235155.html

By Tom Stoppard

Is the Belarus story important? Careful how you answer. The story doesn't photograph well, and it's hopeless for TV. The mere fact of a corrupt and vindictive autocracy is hardly news anyway in this wicked world.


So you could be forgiven for asking: set against the scale and violence of the retaliation by autocracies in North Africa and the Gulf, don't we have worse things to worry about than the crimes of Alexander Lukashenko and his bully boys?

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It's the wrong question.

Better to ask: are we going to let this village tyrant enjoy a respite from scrutiny and accountability because, for the moment, our attention is engaged by larger, louder, more sensational and more photographable news elsewhere?

"President" Lukashenko rigged his election, and is now busy rigging the trials of the opposition candidates who presumed to stand against him. They were among hundreds arrested. More than 30 are held in the KGB cells in Minsk. Others are under house arrest and close guard. Things are shaping up for a legalistic atrocity.

http://www.freebelarusnow.org/

Why is this not on television?

 

[NovaKart]

Doesn't amerikanka mean American woman in Russian?

 

[Yeekim]

Why is this not on television?

They lack oil?

 

[NovaKart]

The mere fact of a corrupt and vindictive autocracy is hardly news anyway in this wicked world.

I think this is the reason. If massive protests break out then maybe it will be a big news story. I don't think Egypt or Yemen have oil either, or at least not a lot of it.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I stopped listening to the first article when it claimed that Belarus got independence from the USSR in 1994. I also enjoyed the link to freebelarusnow.com at the bottom of the article.

 

[Silurian]

Belarus has no oil but could shut down the oil pipelines that run through the country.

 

[NedimNapoleon]

Doesn't amerikanka mean American woman in Russian?

I thought it was something linked to the Balkans, its American woman on Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian and I think Russian

 

[Silurian]

From Independent

The KGB headquarters in the centre of Minsk is known to locals as "Amerikanka". No one is really sure how the sprawling complex got its name, but everyone in Belarus knows it is not a place you want to end up.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...e-distracted-from-this-brutality-2235155.html

 

[madviking]

Doesn't amerikanka mean American woman in Russian?

Indeed.