November 14, 2002	Thursday	Ramazan 8, 1423

BRUSSELS, Nov 13: The presidents of Belarus and Ukraine would not be welcomed at a NATO summit next week, although they could not be stopped from coming, officials and diplomats said on Wednesday.

“It would be rather nice if they decided they have appointments elsewhere,” said one diplomat, referring to Ukraine’s Leonid Kuchma and Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko.

“There is a clear view among NATO nations that they are not welcome” at the Prague summit, but “it’s very difficult to stop them coming,” he said.

“The person who turns up is for the country concerned... We’ve made our feelings clear. They are not meeting the standards we expect,” added a senior NATO official.

Belarus is a member of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, a forum for consultation and co-operation between NATO members and partner states.

But Lukashenko, whose country is not a NATO member, has been branded by Washington as the last dictator in Europe and his regime has been repeatedly denounced for human rights abuses.

The Czech Republic’s failure so far to issue a visa to Lukashenko has sparked outrage in Minsk.

Kuchma said earlier this month that he planned to attend the NATO summit, despite the military alliance’s decision to exclude him from a key meeting.

That announcement came after the United States accused Kuchma of personally approving the sale of an early-warning radar system to Iraq in breach of UN sanctions.—AFP