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Venezuelan leader hails military links with Belarus

Iran Materials 25 July 2006 16:54 (UTC +04:00)

(AFP) - Venezuela and Belarus have created a "strategic alliance" that will include military cooperation, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said during a visit to a military academy in Minsk.

"We have set up a real strategic alliance between Venezuela and Belarus... Cooperation between our two countries will operate through different mechanisms including military-technical ones," Chavez said on Tuesday, reports Trend.

"We have to defend our homelands and oppose ourselves to external threat," said Chavez, who was winding up his three-day visit to a country dubbed the "last dictatorship in Europe" by Washington.

Venezuela's firebrand leader also called on the Belarussian government to "oppose a false democracy that is a actually a dictatorship of the elites and the transnational oligarchs."

At a meeting between with his Belarussian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko on Monday, Chavez called for the creation of a "fighting union" and the two signed an agreement on "strategic partnership."

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