A group of officials from the Taliban junta in Afghanistan paid a visit to the Slutz Cheese-Making Plant in Belarus last week, receiving enthusiastic coverage from local media — but now all of that coverage is disappearing, as embarrassed Belarusian officials are systematically deleting photos and articles about the visit.
“The visit by Taliban officials to the Slutz Cheese-Making Plant in central Belarus was reported on by a local news outlet on August 21, but then deleted from its website and social media channels. Another post about the Taliban delegation’s visit appears to have been removed from a website linked to Belarus’ National Academy of Sciences,” Radio Free Europe (RFE) observed on Monday.
It was not difficult to see why the Belarusian government might have abruptly decided to memory-hole the Taliban visit. Dissidents and opposition leaders had a field day pointing out the incongruity of female Slutz Cheese-Making Plant employees explaining their craft to the all-male delegation from the Taliban, a brutish Islamist regime that has all but outlawed employment and education for women in Afghanistan.
“On the one hand, the regime declares Belarusian journalists, activists, and civil society groups ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists.’ On the other, it quietly welcomes representatives of the Taliban and discusses business with them,” said exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
“Belarusians see who Lukashenka is choosing as Belarus’s friends. They did not choose isolation. They did not choose partnership with the Taliban, North Korea, or other dictatorships,” she said, referring to the longtime dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko.
Lukashenko is a devoted ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is the only nation to have formally recognized the Taliban government since it seized power in 2021. Furthermore, Belarusian social media buzzed with angry comments about the thousands of their countrymen who fought and died in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. Some commentators sarcastically wondered if the Taliban would be given a tour of the monuments to those fallen soldiers.
Belarus’s effort to erase all evidence of the Taliban’s visit to the cheese factory is not going terribly well, since dissidents quickly made backups of all the photos and articles. For their part, the Taliban is still happily cranking out social media posts about their “high-level delegation” visiting Belarus to “explore modern production technologies.”
The Kabul Tribune reported the Taliban delegation to Belarus was led by Irrigation and Livestock Minister Ataullah Omari, accompanied by a dozen representatives from the Taliban’s agricultural, transportation, finance, and commerce ministries, plus officials from state-owned companies in Afghanistan.
In early August, three officials from the Taliban Agriculture Ministry paid a similar official visit to Moldova to “discuss expanding practical and technical cooperation between the two countries.”
The Moldovan people were outraged by the warm welcome their government extended to the Islamist extremists and their ire was not much alleviated by Moldovan official Vasile Sarban explaining that he issued the invitation at the urging of businessmen who wanted to make money on exports to Afghanistan.
“I believe it is right for the authorities of Moldova to look after Moldova’s economic operators. If our producers say they have nowhere to sell, the state should help them find markets,” Sarban said.
The Moldovan government ended up backpedaling, insisting that it would comply with all international sanctions against the Taliban regime, and promising not to hold any “bilateral meetings or official contacts” with the Taliban emissaries.