Deputy Assistant Secretary Daniel Russell’s Statement to the Press

November 17, 2010
Minsk, Belarus

Good afternoon,

I am here in Belarus as part of a larger trip to the region. I was just in Ukraine as the American participant in the “5+2” talks on Transniester. And I wanted to have a chance to come again to Belarus and to meet with the people both in the government and outside of the government—civil society leaders and some presidential candidates and leaders of the political parties. Within the government of Belarus, my talks with Foreign Minister Martynov are part of the process of principled engagement that the Obama Administration began last year with the visit of my boss, Assistant Secretary Phil Gordon to Minsk.  Today we discussed the full range of bilateral relations. We talked about some of the economic cooperation issues, such as our program to help Belarus start a Master of Business Administration program. But at the same time I think it’s important to know that normalization of our bilateral relations—which is the goal of both the United States and Belarus—remains limited. As you know, the financial sanctions and the travel restrictions that the United States put in place several years ago remain because there has been no progress on the democracy and human rights issues which led the United States to imposing those sanctions. And I think it’s important to know that in the United States this policy enjoys bipartisan support. The policy begun under the Bush Administration, and was reconfirmed and continued by the Obama Administration. And again—our goal is to improve bilateral relations between our governments and, certainly, our peoples, and we would like to see concrete progress on democracy and human rights that would make that possible.

Since your election campaign starts tomorrow, it would be appropriate to comment on that as well. I think it is obvious, but worth repeating,  that the United States has no preferred candidate in your elections.  We join the European Union in supporting a democratic, fair and competitive election process. As we look at the upcoming elections, we welcome the decision to invite an OSCE observer mission and to allow it to operate freely. In the electoral process, we have positively noted the improvement in allowing candidates to gather signatures for registration and to become registered. At the same time, we would like to see free and unhindered access to the media by all candidates running for office; regrettably, that has not been the case.

We are also concerned about the lack of broad representation on the electoral commissions organized for the elections.  We were happy to see the recent comments about the observers’ access to watch the count of the vote. And we hope that observers—both international and domestic—will have the opportunity to play a meaningful role in the vote count. And I think it’s important to know that when we are talking about elections, we are talking about international standards that the United States itself meets. To put it in another way, we are not asking Belarus to do what the United States doesn’t do. And if you’ve seen the outcome of our mid-term elections and the results for President Obama’s party, I think you’ll have a pretty good idea about our own process. I think it’s worth noting what the President said after our elections: “Regardless of the outcome, power in the United States rests with the people.  And that is at the core of our system of representative and accountable government.”

I want to thank everyone I’ve had a chance to meet with for their hospitality here and to say that what the United States wants for Belarus is what Belarusians want for themselves. And that is a prosperous, pluralistic Belarus that is integrated into modern Europe.

And with that, I’ll take your questions.