In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States, the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko, the autocratic president of Belarus, is unlikely to provoke much of a flutter in Britain’s corridors of power or over the dinner table this weekend.
But it cannot be altogether shrugged off that a country with a population of ten million in the heart of eastern Europe will be ruled for the next five years by a man surrounded by the kind of serious allegations that would bring down the government of a less peace-loving country.
Since Lukashenko first came to power seven years ago, Belarus has earned the dubious accolade of being Europe’s last pariah state. Today, it is perhaps the least predictable country in the stretch of Europe running from the Baltic states to the Black Sea. That instability will continue for five more years now that Batka or “Papa”, as he is known, has won an unconvincing second landslide victory, in which government officials said he gained 75 per cent of the vote, while observers gauged his support at more like 50 per cent.
For western governments, the difficulty lies in how to react to Lukashenko’s autocratic rule. The most headline-grabbing allegation made about the Belarusian leader is that he has ordered hit squads to get rid of his political opponents. Four men seen as challengers to Lukashenko have vanished in the past two years. These disappearances began after the opposition – a vague coalition including youth groups and various democratic sympathisers – staged a mock presidential election and started demonstrating on the streets of Minsk in 1999. That year, the former interior minister Yuri Zakharenko, along with the opposition candidate Viktor Gonchar and a businessman who backed him, Anatoly Krasovsky, went missing. Last July, Dmitri Zavadsky, a former personal cameraman to the president – he stopped working for him because he was afraid people would “spit in his face”, according to his wife – went missing at Minsk airport.
All four men are assumed to have been killed. The government investigation has so far led nowhere. The country’s top prosecutor and the head of the KGB were fired when they detained the leader of an elite paramilitary group for questioning in connection with the disappearances, while the detainee himself was released and promoted. KGB defectors have since claimed that the men were kidnapped and murdered, and two detectives who worked on the cases have obtained asylum in the US. According to the evidence that has seeped out over past weeks, the men were all killed with the silenced pistol normally reserved for executions.
Irina Krasovskaya, whose husband had given financial backing to Gonchar, the opposition candidate, said she hopes that Belarusians will find a way to bring in a new, democratic government before Lukashenko’s five-year term is up. She said she wants the western media to publicise her plight, along with that of the wives of the other “disappeared” men, but is unsure whether western governments should intervene. “We should sort this out ourselves, in our own country,” she said in an interview last week. When Irina and the other wives speak out at public meetings, men in drab clothes come up close to film them. The men refuse to answer questions about which television station they work for. Do they look like students, like private detectives? “Like police,” said Irina smiling.
Strange disappearances are not the only accusations that lend the quiet streets of Minsk a certain tension. The Belarusian government is defensive about allegations that it sells upgraded air defence to Iraq and that it is trafficking women, often country girls who believe they will be nannying abroad but find themselves locked in prostitution.
Lukashenko’s dictatorial rule includes Soviet-style censorship. He monopolises the media every day – and did so especially during the election campaign. His control of the country is such that, minutes before an opposition rally in Minsk on the dark and rainy evening of election day, the lights and telephones in a building where the meeting focused were mysteriously cut off.
Journalists provide countless examples of harassment by the authorities. Those authorities may not always back their Batka. Interestingly, even certain members of the police and of the presidential security service who were interviewed as they patrolled the country’s ministries before the election said that they would not vote for Lukashenko. But that is Minsk. Outside the city, there are plenty of Belarusians who genuinely love Papa.
While commonly misconstrued in the west as little more than an extension of Russia, Belarus has its own language, culture, history and political traditions. Lukashenko, like most Belarusians, sticks to Russian, but he is known to switch to Belarusian when berating the opposition.
Lukashenko’s supporters approve of how Belarus, unlike other parts of the former Soviet Union and areas in Russia, has not experienced any ethnic violence since it gained independence from Moscow in 1991. Belarusians even speak of their own legendary patience, which they claim has helped prevent bigger reactions to the Lukashenko regime.
But right now, for the first time in a decade, the ever-tolerant Belarusians are beginning to lose patience. Youth opposition groups are gaining thousands of members. Experts estimated that the opposition actually gained between 30 and 40 per cent of the votes in the election. Yet those who oppose Lukashenko have only the colourless opposition leader Vladimir Goncharik to champion and rally round. “Compared with Lukashenko, I think anything else will seem great. Otherwise, Belarus will fall into deep poverty,” said Alexander Starykevich, a 28-year-old journalist.
For the American government, the situation in Belarus is a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, between David and Goliath. Yet this overlooks how several million Belarusians seem to support Lukashenko and oppose western-backed economic and political reforms. These people, mainly the rural poor and elderly, have believed the authorities for 70 years, and have trouble imagining that Lukashenko could lie on television.
However, the US government seems to believe that most Belarusians want reforms – and if they don’t, they must be ignorant. That attitude is shared by many among the elites in Minsk.
Some Americans view Belarus as another Serbia – and indeed, officials responsible for Serbia and Belarus were united at a US State Department meeting in February. But the comparison annoys Belarusians, who point to a different political history, culture and mentality.
The American ambassador to Belarus, Michael Kozak, has already revealed his approach to the country – with extraordinary frankness. In a letter to the Guardian published just before the elections, he said that the US “objective and to some degree methodology are the same” in Belarus as in Nicaragua in 1989-90. Then, he worked for the US State Department under the Bush administration. He claims he did not work with the US-backed Contra rebels there. Later, as assistant secretary of state and a special presidential envoy, he offered an exit deal to Manuel Noriega. Most recently, he served as US envoy to Cuba.
Today, the US embassy in Belarus helps to fund 300 assorted non-governmental organisations, some of which have such strong links to the opposition that they are considered part of it. That is usual in Belarus, where everything is so politicised, and the stakes so high, that it is difficult to take a position outside both the opposition and Lukashenko camps.
“[The US] really helped the opposition financially, so much that the opposition has gone crazy,” Alexander Feduta, a journalist and former Lukashenko insider who is now a fierce opponent of his regime, told the Christian Science Monitor: “Name me any other country where you get paid for being in the opposition.” Others say that they want the American aid but complain that the wrong groups are targeted. One newspaper editor criticised American seminars on “how we should live”.
But most people in Minsk welcome the American approach, largely because they are desperate to get rid of Lukashenko and transform Belarus into a democratic European country – something like the Baltic states.
What plays a major role in all this is the history of Belarus. Before the Soviets took over, it had been in and out of wars for centuries. But since independence, there has been peace in Belarus, while corners of Russia and the former Soviet countries have blown up into conflict – for example, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya in Russia and Crimea in Ukraine. Many of these countries have experienced radical economic reforms – backed in particular by the US – that have left many people poverty-stricken. There is now an increasing body of evidence that these reforms were flawed, based on a poor knowledge of the history, culture and traditions of the former Soviet bloc countries.
While there is widespread poverty in Belarus, people are living in far worse conditions in some parts of Russia and Ukraine. Pensions, for example, come to about $30 a month in Belarus; in certain areas in Russia, they are $10 a month. In Georgia, the biggest recipient of US aid after Israel and Egypt, pensioners get about $7 a month, sometimes paid a year late. Uzbekistan, hailed as America’s top strategic partner a few years ago, is now a brutally repressive regime that foments Islamic radicalism by getting extremely tough on those who practise the religion.
Some also point out that, while Lukashenko’s regime is loudly condemned, President Vladimir Putin’s continued campaign in Chechnya – where civilian casualties run into the thousands and human rights violations by Russian soldiers, as well as by Chechen rebels, are common – is far better tolerated. Lukashenko has capitalised on US and European involvement in Belarus, accusing the west of using “sleazy election techniques” and omitting to say that the economy is in tatters.
It seems that both the US government and the Minsk elites have forgotten about the people outside the capital, who could suffer most under speedy reforms that may fail to take into account the history and traditions of Belarus.
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