In the wake of a recent meeting with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in New York, Foreign Minister Uladzimir Makey granted an interview to state-run Belarusian TV.
According to Makey, he informed the top official that some UN representatives in Belarus ‘had used the UN funds to support protesters. In the minister’s opinion, they were doing that ‘behind the back’ of the UN Secretary General.
Uladzimir Makey laid the blame for such actions on a number of Antonio Guterres’ aides who are ‘representatives of the EU member states’:
“Behind his back, they are doing nasty things. And if some materials are published at the UN’s initiative in the near future, we will tell you about how some UN representatives in Belarus used UN funds allocated for the disabled persons to back participants in the protest rallies.”
The head of Belarusian diplomacy also said that he ‘warned Secretary General’ that Belarus would disclose those facts to Belarusian society and UN partners if the organisation ‘broke the agreements’. However, he did not provide any further details about the above mentioned agreements.
Uladzimir Makey claims that in the course the meeting he ‘was compelled’ to raise a few problematic issues in the UN-Belarus relations, and he ‘put a special emphasis’ on the unacceptability of using certain UN bodies for ‘demonising Belarus and discrediting it’. Pro-government media report that Antonio Guterres ‘positively assessed the role of Minsk in a number of initiatives contributing to the stabilisation of the situation in the world’; if Makey’s words are anything to go by, Secretary General ‘thanked’ for Belarus’ contribution.
However, pro-Lukashenka mouthpieces failed to make mention of the UN’s strong criticism of the current reprisals in Belarus. Since the outbreak of protests in the summer of 2020, the United Nations, its bodies, and Guterres personally have repeatedly spoken out against the regime’s human rights violations and the brutal crackdown on the dissenters.
On September 24, an interactive dialogue on the human rights situation in Belarus took place on September 24 at the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stresses that the situation in Belarus has continued to worsen in 2021.
