BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

08/12/2006

While Lukashenka Questions Shushkevich's Right To Sign It

Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka said in an interview broadcast on Belarusian Television on December 7 that former parliamentary speaker Stanislau Shushkevich, who was formally Belarus's head of state in 1991, did not have the right to sign the agreement on the breakup of the USSR. "Yeltsin was a president. He could sign something. But our [speaker] did not have that right.... If deputies in the Supreme Soviet had known about that in advance, they would most likely dismissed Shushkevich from his post before his trip to the Belavezha Forest," Lukashenka said. Lukashenka also reiterated allegations that the accord on the dissolution of the USSR was hastily adopted by politicians under the influence of alcohol. "They wrote it in a hurry, and this can be seen from the documents they composed there. But they -- the Russian delegation -- knew what documents to adopt. They scribbled their signatures, drank to that, called the people they needed to, reported or announced that such a country was not existing any longer etc., and began to slowly depart," Lukashenka said. According to Lukashenka, if Moscow had given an order to the Belarusian KGB to arrest Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich at Viskuli in 1991, the order would have been fulfilled "within minutes." JM

Source:

http://www.rferl.org/newsline/2006/12/3-cee/cee-081206.asp

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