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Lukashenko's response was predictable: "The political situation in Belarus is stable and there is no need for a revolution" and "foreign efforts to impose democracy or end [our] alliance with Russia [will] fail."

It is doubtless disconcerting for Lukashenko to watch as one by one his former allies in the Commonwealth of Independent States toss out their dictators in favor of western-style democracy, most recently in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Ukraine was an especially bitter pill to swallow. Lukashenko blamed Kuchma's loss on Polish interference. If it were not for the fact that Poland is a member of NATO the war of words between the two countries may have by now escalated beyond mere fighting words. In September 2001, Lukashenko charged that Poland had become a "bridgehead from which the invasion of the former Soviet Union advances.

"Tell me, in what way have we not pleased our neighbor Poland?...The Americans have started exerting pressure through Poland. Just look: where have hi-tech devices to monitor Belarusian territory been installed? In Poland...From whose territory is our country being showered with untrue information? From Poland."

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski meanwhile has called the Belarus authorities' attitude to the large Polish minority living in Belarus "unacceptable."

BUT EVEN A RUTHLESS dictator needs friends, and the Leftist Tyrants Club is rapidly shrinking. By the late 1990s Belarus exported $400 million of armaments annually to allies in Iran, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Baathist war criminals averted capture by being issued Belarusian passports. Gone now are Lukashenko's old friends Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, leaving only a handful of aging Russian communists and Cuba's Fidel Castro to commiserate with.

Despite his fondness for Stalin and former Soviet tyrants, Lukashenko still has soft spot for fascists too. "The history of Germany is a copy of the history of Belarus," he announced on Belarus radio. "Germany was raised from the ruins thanks to firm authority, and not everything connected with that well-known figure, Adolf Hitler, was bad. German order evolved over the centuries and under Hitler it attained its peak."

And like his idols Stalin and Hitler, Lukashenko is fast becoming famous for his death squads. On September 16, 1999, opposition politician Viktor Gonchar and businessman Anatoly Krasovsky disappeared from a Minsk steam bath after complaining of being shadowed by the KGB. The next year former Interior Minister Yury Zakharenko and TV cameraman and former Lukashenko assistant Dmitry Zavadsky vanished. All of this happened shortly after the Belarus president ordered his interior ministry to crack down on "opposition scum."

In June 2001, the BBC reported that two former members of the state prosecutor's office had alleged complicity of high government officials in the murder of the four opponents. The prosecutors alleged that Viktor Sheyman, former head of the security council, ordered the murder suspects released and the investigation closed. Sheyman was subsequently promoted to prosecutor general.

Asked to defend his human rights record, Lukashenko sounds remarkably like an American apologist for Milosevic's brutal regime. "What human rights can you talk about after Yugoslavia?" he said in April 2000. "What kind of human rights issues, what kind of U.S. interests are there in the Balkans?... Why did they bomb the country, causing millions of dollars in damage? What kind of rights can you talk about? And now they start lecturing Russia. This is absurd...this is an internal affair."

Defend tyranny by attacking the U.S. Europe's last dictator has learned well from the American left.

Christopher Orlet is a former Peace Corps volunteer in Poland and a frequent contributor.

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