Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-01-19-Speech-3-510-000"
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"en.20110119.25.3-510-000"2
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"Mr President, Lady Ashton, ladies and gentlemen, the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament expresses its great regret that these presidential elections have turned into another missed opportunity for the country to set out firmly and with commitment on the road to democracy.
We can, however, say that essentially, the European Union’s policy of gradually engaging Belarus on certain conditions has yielded certain results, so we should be wary of calls for a radical change to our policy.
I say this because it is thanks to our engagement that the presidential campaign ultimately made some progress, and it could be that it was also the reason why many more people gathered on the square in Minsk than the organisers had expected. In other words, we had probably generated an atmosphere of greater freedom which the citizens of Belarus may have interpreted correctly.
However, from here on, we have to be, in the first place, clear and firm enough with our demands to the authorities in Belarus to free those detained and to immediately stop persecuting all those who took part in or organised the protests in one form or another. We cannot compromise on this, and we have to be quite clear about what we want.
Anther element, however, is what we can do in the medium and long term. Firstly, we have to avoid casting the country back into isolation, because in that way, as the representatives of the opposition and of civil society stressed, Belarus’ isolation means the isolation of the country’s citizens.
What we have to do is, within the framework of the policy we already have towards Belarus, to try and take certain measures to adjust our policy, so that it benefits the country’s citizens and supports its media, civil society, the opposition. In this way, we can create an environment in which fair and democratic elections will be possible.
We should, in my view, work towards this with Belarus’ non-EU neighbours, Russia and Ukraine, and, as a parliament, try and use the opportunities provided by the Eastern Partnership and EURONEST to engage the other five countries in the Partnership in joint activities to democratise Belarus."@en1
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