More than usual, anyway. The UN Commission on Human Rights just passed a resolution condemning Belarus for abuses.

Following the adoption on 14 April of a resolution by the UN Human Rights Commission alleging human rights abuses by Belarusian officials, Syarhey Aleynik, Belarus’s permanent representative to the UN, criticized the document as “another attempt to create a distorted picture of the country’s situation in order to justify the intention of its co-sponsors to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign state,” Belapan and Interfax-Belarus reported. Aleynik said that the resolution has passed under “unprecedented pressure from the United States,” which has no moral right to “act as a champion of human rights in the world.”

But get this last one-liner:

Twenty-three out of the 53 members of the Commission voted for the document, with more than half the members either opposing or abstaining. The Russian permanent representative at the UN’s Geneva office, Leonid Skotnikov, told ITAR-TASS that he was surprised that Ukraine supported the resolution. JAC

But again, who is surprised?

The European Union, on conjunction with this, recently announced a bunch of aid earmarked for encouraging democratic civil society in Belarus.

THE EU is increasing its support for ordinary citizens in Belarus in an effort to counter what it says is the country????????s collapse into dictatorship.

About ???????12 million has been voted by the EU for a range of programmes to encourage democracy in the country bordering Russia and three EU states – Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

The EU????????s European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights will spend the money on working with civil society and Non-Government Organisations, on educational efforts and getting the message of democracy across in the media such as on radio.

Luxembourg Foreign Affairs Minister, Jean Asselborn, who chaired the meeting of EU Foreign Ministers at the weekend, said the Belarus regime ???????has made every effort to stifle the last critical voices … and has tightened its hold on all aspects of the political and social life of the country.???????

Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern said Belarus is the only country on its borders with which the EU has no relationship. Ireland, with its history of helping those affected by the nuclear fall-out from Chernobyl, had a major interest in this country, he added.

Belarus is closely tied into Russia but its president, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, has been shutting off the country from the rest of the world. There are growing reports of torture, executions and the disappearance of political opponents.

Speaking of political opponents, one just got charged for trying to smuggle in money to help opposition groups.

MINSK — Authorities have detained a man who allegedly tried to smuggle $200,000 from neighboring Lithuania into Belarus for an opposition lawmaker who has campaigned for President Alexander Lukashenko’s ouster, state-run television reported Monday.

The report cited no sources and did not identify the suspected smuggler, but said the money was intended to help former lawmaker Sergei Skrebets fund opposition groups who are under increasing pressure from Lukashenko’s government.

Skrebets said the accusations were a provocation, claiming security officials coerced two former business partners into saying they had smuggled the money at Skrebets’ request.

He said Alexei Drobov and Konstantin Kovalyov were detained Thursday and kept in hotel room in Minsk for two days until both testified that Skrebets had requested they deliver him a large sum of money. Drobov had been beaten and threatened with death if he refused to confess, Skrebets said, while Kovalyov had been drugged.

David McDuff points to a very well-written column by Gosia Wozniacka in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Everything failed that night. I was running with the radio microphone buried in my coat pocket and the camera dangling on my left shoulder. Helmet- clad Belarusian militiamen had already encircled the demonstration.

I came to a halt just next to the “Belarus Lives” banner where the riot police were pulling out their batons. And at the very second they launched themselves on the protesters, my microphone stopped working and the camera ran out of film. Empty handed, I faced KGB agents in long, black coats and heard the first skulls crack.

“Come closer,” one agent beckoned, grinning, motioning to the melee. Beside me, two police officers had a young boy by his jacket — one of the several thousand demonstrators disputing a rigged parliamentary election. They were kicking and beating him enthusiastically with nightsticks. The boy looked like a frail, flailing bird with outstretched wings. “Come snap a photo,” the agent hissed.

Wait a minute, I told myself: The Soviet Union collapsed 14 years ago. My own country of birth, Poland, had already galloped toward full-fledged democracy, and neighboring Ukraine was just then boiling on the edge of revolution. So why did this poker-faced goon seem so confident? Didn’t he know he looked like a bad Hollywood stand-in?

My fists and stomach clenched. Images of militiamen beating up Polish protesters, agents searching my family flat, and tanks rolling through Gdansk, Warsaw, Budapest and Prague flashed through my mind. My father had been interned for six months. We fled communism looking for a better life. But that was in another age, before the Iron Curtain crumbled and wildly celebrating East Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall stone by stone.

Why, I wondered, hadn’t Belarus heard the news? This question was already on my mind when I first arrived in the capital, Minsk, to see the land that time forgot, the last petrified outpost of European communism.

Make sure to check out abdymok’s Belarus update, just download the Word file.