BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

25/10/2007

Belarus to send envoy to Israel to mend fences after diplomatic row

Jerusalem (dpa) - Belarus President Aleksander Lukashenko is to send a special envoy to Jerusalem in a bid to mend fences with the Jewish state, following an angry Israeli reaction to remarks he made which were perceived as blatantly anti-Semitic.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement that newspaper editor Pavel Iakoubovitch, himself Jewish and close to the Belarus leader, will arrive "in the coming days" for what is officially "a discussion on bilateral relations."

In his October 12 remarks to Russian reporters in Minsk, Lukashenko maintained that Slavic ethnicities such as Belarusians and Russians took better care of their cities than ethnic Jews.

"Have ever been to Bobrusk, have you ever seen what state the city is in? It was terrifying to go inside, it was such a pigsty. It was a predominantly Jewish city, and you know how Jews treat the places they live," he said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni blasted the comments saying that "the role of leadership is to fight anti-Semitism, wherever it raises its ugly head all over the world, not to encourage it."

Much of modern Belarus was heavily settled by Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of a Russian Empire policy the ethnic group should only live in selected, and usually poor provinces.

But the Holocaust effectively wiped out Belarus' Jewish population.

Source:

http://www.eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=16600

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