VILNIUS - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that the time has come for change in Belarus, which she described as the last dictatorship in central Europe.
She made the bluntly-worded comments in Vilnius, where was due to meet with Belarus opposition leaders on the sidelines of a NATO foreign ministers' meeting in the Lithuanian capital.
Noting that revolutions have swept through Georgia and Ukraine in the last year or two, she said there were other places where "opposition forces are speaking out about developments in their society.
This was the case "even in Belarus which ... is really the last true dictatorship in the centre of Europe," she told a joint press conference with Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus.
"It is time for change to come to Belarus," she added.
Rice had already voiced criticism of the regime of Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk earlier in her Europe trip, which began in Moscow on Tuesday, saying that "Belarus has been held back by the nature of that regime."
Lukashenko last year won a controversial referendum that in effect makes him a life-long president of one of Europe's poorest and most diplomatically isolated republics.
Rice's approach to the Belarus opposition threatens to raise the hackles of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has already been at odds with Washington over democratic movements in other former Soviet republics.
Rice sought Wednesday to allay such concerns in Moscow.
"I wanted to send a very strong message that the US does not see developments in the former Soviet states, now independent states, as in any way anti-Russia or meant to dminish Russian influence but rather the normal development of democratic process," she said on board her plane from Moscow.
Lukashenko vowed only this week that there would be no Western-inspired "revolution" in his country -- which has a border only 30 km (20 miles) from Vilnius -- and that he would stay in power until 2010.
"We categorically reject the scenarios of 'democratic change' of political elites who don't please people in the West," he said in an annual message to the Belarussian people Tuesday.
Referring to the uprisings in countries such as Ukraine -- where the ouster of the former leadership was called the "orange revolution" -- Lukashenko said: "All these coloured revolutions are pure and simple banditry."
"We are going to accomplish key tasks in the coming five years," he said. "Only the Belarus people can prevent us from doing that. No money will overthrow the government in Belarus."
04/20/2005 18:13 GMT