Iryna Khalip: «Normal people don’t talk at all, whether they like Jews or not»
- 25.10.2007, 12:12
“Lukashenka is absolutely wrongly persuaded that for resolving of the conflict between Belarus and Israel is enough to send there one person who has a notice in metrics that he is a Jew. As if the Israeli would look at Yakubovich and say, if even in “Sovetskaya Belorussia” a Jew works, there is no anti-Semitism in the country and can’t be. But the Israeli are not so silly to swallow such a fly. Paval Yakubovich can be anyone, but not a diplomat and negotiator, so his participant in the attempt to resolve the conflict won’t be successful by definition”, - famous journalist Iryna Khalip said to Charter’97 press center commenting the information about editor of “Sovetskaya Belorussia” Paval Yakubovich’s visit to Israel in order to resolve the Belarus-Israel conflict.
“Moreover, if we take into account the fact that Paval Yakubovich for a long time belongs to Lukashenka’s servants, whose reflexes have died off, the reflexes responsible for expressing own thoughts and feelings, not for just reverberating of the general line. Even if Yakubovich exerts himself, he can’t say anything deviating from Lukashenka’s policy, and so any attempt to use him as a negotiator is doomed to failure. Yakubovich was likely given a task to tell how the Belarusian authorities like Jews. But normal people don’t talk at all whether they like Jews or not”, - Iryna Khalip noted.
We remind that 12 October at the press conference Aliaksandr Lukashenka said:”If you visited Babruisk, you saw in what condition the town was. It was frightfully to enter! It was a pigsty! It was largely a Jewish town. You know what the attitude the Jews have towards the place they are living. Look at Israel”. At the same time he said the Jews living abroad have “invest 60 millions to the Belarusian economy” and invites them to come back to the country.
The Lukashenka’s words have raised indignation of the Israeli authorities. The Ambassador of Israel left Minsk.