10/05/2005 Putin's big welcome mat
By Neil Buckley, Isabel Gorst and Robin Oakley
Published: May 9 2005 by Financial Times
Even the most contentious wedding seat plan looks easy compared with the process of deciding who will stand where in the line-up for the 60th anniversary celebrations in Moscow today to mark the defeat of Nazism.
Russia's emergence as a democracy (sort of) means Vladimir Putin has managed to attract world leaders including George Bush, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, Silvio Berlusconi and Junichiro Koizumi.
But Russia's history and geography also means that a rogues' gallery of autocrats past and present is turning up.
There is Alexander Lukashenko, of Belarus, a friend of Putin, but whom the US calls Europe's last dictator; the less-than-liberal Islam Karimov, of Uzbekistan; and, oddly, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Polish strongman of the 1980s.
Kim Jong-il, of North Korea, has not accepted his invitation, but Moscow has attracted the next best thing, President Saparmurat Niyazov, of Turkmenistan.
Niyazov prefers to call himself Turkmenbashi, or Father of all the Turkmens, and recently renamed the month of January after himself.
Fortunately, it turns out, an alphabetical approach works rather well. Bush is near Berlusconi; Schröder, transliterated into Cyrillic, comes next to Chirac. Alexander Kwasniewski, the Polish president, who has been agonising over whether to attend at all, does less well: he gets Lukashenko.
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