Mikalai Khalezin, famous Belarusian playwright and head of the Free Theatre, commented on the decision of the EU foreign ministers in his blog:<\/p>\n
\u2013 Well, Lukashenka is going to Prague for the Eastern Partnership summit.<\/p>\n
In December last year, we met with Vaclav Havel at his place. We were talking that we couldn\u2019t allow Alyaksandr Lukashenka to come to the Czech capital. We were talking about the Prague Spring; about dissidents, whose lives were ruined in prisons and mental hospitals; about new European politicians, who are ready to betray the democratic ideals for the sake of ephemeral \u201cpolitical stability\u201d; about cynical new-European \u201cpolitical purposefulness\u201d, ruining both will and reason.<\/p>\n
We have recently had another conversation with Havel at the summit Forum for Creative Europe in Prague. He said: \u201cyou must be in Prague in May. I expect you to come. It\u2019s not important whether Lukashenka will be present here or not.\u201d We spoke what we should do and how we should behave in a situation of total betrayal of democratic ideals by European officials… This betrayal has happened, but we will be ourselves, we continue defending our views consistently…<\/p>\n
Our friend, an influential person in the Czech political environment, said: \u201cYou can solve more problems than the people considering themselves politicians. Do it and you will help us to feel we are different.\u201d Prague is ready to explain the last dictatorship how he should behave in the modern world. We are ready. And you, \u201cthe last\u201d, are you ready? Well, then let\u2019s try one another…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mikalai Khalezin called invitation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka to Prague betrayal of ideals of freedom and democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}