#14
New Statesman (UK)
17 September 2001
Why the rural millions love a dictator
By Alice Lagnado
In Belarus, the re-election of the autocratic president was probably rigged.
But is the US right to finance the opposition? Alice Lagnado reports
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.
