BELARUS….

Faced with continuing censorship, restrictions on the use of the Belarusan language and ideological pressure, the chairman of the Belarusan Writers’ Union, Uladzimir Nyaklyaeu, has requested political asylum in Poland. If the Poles grant the request, Nyaklyaeu will join several members of the Popular Front, the principal opposition to Belarusan dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka, in Polish exile. The Front’s emigre chairman, Zyanon Paznyak, operates mostly out of Poland…. Boris Yeltsin in Germany told the press that the reunification of Belarus with Russia is a “natural process” or “peoples acting of their own free will” … Russian and Belarusan forces have just concluded “Zapad (West) 99,” a joint training exercise in which Belarus is the staging ground for a Russian counteroffensive against a NATO strike into Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea.