Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, long shunned by the West, on Monday met Pope Benedict on a trip to Italy that ends more than a decade of diplomatic isolation. Lukashenko, accused by critics of crushing fundamental rights in his country, was also due to meet Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Foreign Minister Franco Frattini for a working dinner on Monday night.
A Vatican statement made an indirect reference to the situation of democracy and human rights in Belarus, saying the pope and other Vatican officials spoke to Lukashenko about "certain internal problems of the country". Lukashenko's trip to Italy and the Vatican, his first official visit to a Western country since he visited France in 1995, has been marked by controversy.
An editorial in Italy's leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera, criticised the Berlusconi government for allowing a man it called "Europe's last dictator" to break his isolation in Italy. Frattini responded with a letter to the newspaper on Monday, saying the visit was part of a European Union thaw.
Earlier this month Lukashenko secured an invitation to the EU's May 7 "Eastern Partnership" summit in Prague aimed at providing support for six former Soviet republics and easing energy dependence on Moscow. Frattini said in his letter that the visit was intended to help Belarus "take up a gradual path of democratic evolution" and "encourage a progressive nearing of Belarus to Europe and its democratic standards".
Belarus was until last year criticised repeatedly in Washington and Brussels, and Lukashenko was banned from entering the European Union on the ground that he had rigged his re-election in 2006. Western countries were moved by the release of the last detainees seen as political prisoners, an end to restrictions on the publication of opposition newspapers and an election that proved somewhat freer than previous contests.