[tz] Belarus is listed in MSK timezone

[Dzmitry Kazimirchyk]

On 4/2/15 4:13 PM, John Haxby wrote:
> In the case of Minsk, do people in that locale most often say and write
> "MSK" in the way that the Australians write "AEST" and the British
> "GMT"?   What documentary evidence is there for both MSK and an alternative?

The entire country of Belarus has only one time zone, therefore we are 
not dealing with time zones very often. I would say that in daily use 
the most common term for describing local time zone is "Minsk time" 
(Paul Eggert had already posted a number of links to sources using it to 
describe time in Belarus). However there are no commonly used 
abbreviations as to my knowledge. As far as abbreviations go most often 
Belarus time zone is referred to as GMT+3 or UTC+3.

MSK abbreviation however is strongly associated with "Moscow" and 
"Moscow time".

>
> This is completely apolitical, it's purely geographical.  It's what
> people who regard their timezone as Europe/Minsk habitually use for the
> timezone identifier.
>
> Does that make sense?

It makes an absolute sense. The problem here is that Belarus (as to my 
knowledge as a local) doesn't have habitual time zone abbreviation 
(other than maybe GMT+3/UTC+3), however it does have habitual time zone 
name which is "Minsk time". What I'm trying to say that it might be 
wrong trying to force foreign time zone abbreviation which already has 
strong associations with "Moscow time" in a local community (and as I've 
mentioned previously is tied to a location inside another country and 
changes following government decisions of that other country) to be used 
to describe time in Belarus, effectively using TZ database as a tool to 
inject this term.


--
Dzmitry Kazimirchyk