President Alexandr Lukashenka of Belarus has added a referendum to the October 17 parliamentary elections, asking Belarusians to allow him to participate in the next presidential election (prohibited by his own tailor-made constitution) and to remove the presidential term limits from the constitution.
Lukashenka, an authoritarian, anti-Western populist and former collective farm boss, took office illegally after the 1996 constitutional coup. If the October 17 referendum passes, he will have taken a giant step toward becoming a "president for life"--an unseemly sight in democratic Europe. Not only could he run for a third term in 2006, but for an indeterminate number of terms thereafter. This would allow him to remain in office indefinitely--particularly given his policy of preventing political parties from competing in parliamentary elections, having equal access to the media, or placing their own observers on local and regional electoral commissions as provided by law.
The authoritarian Belarus has become a near-pariah state in Europe, especially after Lukashenka caused several opposition leaders to "disappear" in the late 1990s. Sources in Minsk confirmed that the dictator's henchmen murdered them. The U.S. and the EU countries responded by jointly agreeing to deny travel visas to a list of Belarusian officials from Lukashenka's inner circle. This may be a step in the right direction, but it is insufficient. Lukashenka can simply retaliate by banning U.S. and EU officials from visiting Belarus.
Moscow Apprehensive. Some in the Putin Administration are also apprehensive about Lukashenka and resent the basket-case Belarusian economy that is an albatross around their country's neck. Moreover, the Putin Administration is aware that Lukashenka nurses an ambition to engineer a unification between Russia and Belarus in such a way that he could run for president of Russia. In fact, Lukashenka has expressed his admiration for Hitler and Stalin.
Russians should know that, if they absorb Belarus or even tolerate the abuses of power, the influence of Lukashenka's authoritarianism may exacerbate their own country's uneasy relationship with democracy. Furthermore, the world's indifference to Lukashenka's power grab may encourage President Vladimir Putin's entourage to advise Putin to remain in power after 2008, when his term ends.
Cooperation with Europe. The U.S. and Europe have numerous interests at stake in Belarus, including how its failed democracy may influence its neighbors, particularly Russia and Ukraine, which will elect its next president on October 31. Belarus is also suspected of selling weapons to rogue regimes, such as Iran and Saddam's Iraq. Anti-Western arms dealers in Minsk may also be selling weapons to terrorist groups around the world, including those fighting in Iraq.
However, the West has some powerful tools for fighting the Belarusian dictator and his henchmen. In the past, the U.S. has worked with allies such as Italy and the U.K. to stop overseas shipments of Ukrainian arms to the Balkans in violation of international sanctions. Furthermore, the U.S. has never recognized an absolute sovereign immunity defense, which means heads of state can be prosecuted under U.S. law. The U.S. also has investigated leaders from the post-Soviet states, including Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma (and most of his senior team) and the late Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliev. Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko and former Panamanian President Manuel Noriega have been convicted in U.S. courts. There are many opportunities for Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels to cooperate on Belarus.
On October 6, Congress passed the Belarus Democracy Act of 2004 (H.R. 854), sponsored by Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) and others, to fund a broad range of measures to support democracy in Belarus. Although this is a beginning, the executive branch and Congress need to do more. Specifically, they should:
- Denounce publicly Lukashenka's violations of the constitution and electoral procedures, and the State Department should amplify its criticism of Belarus's flawed political system.
- Declare , with the EU, that the referendum and parliamentary elections are illegitimate if observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe find election falsification or other violations.
- Use domestic and international law enforcement agencies, such as Interpol, in cooperation with EU members, to coordinate criminal investigations into homicides, money laundering, and illegal arms trading linked to the Lukashenka regime.
- Investigate the disappearances of Lukashenka's political opponents, provided there is a jurisdictional nexus to the U.S. and/or Europe. Both the U.S. Justice Department and its European counterparts can do so. Moreover, Europe and the U.S. could initiate criminal proceedings against those in the president's circle who ordered and participated in the murder of opposition politicians and journalists.
- Seize assets of Lukashenka and his inner circle through criminal proceedings against illegal arms sales and money laundering operations if Belarus violated U.S. or international sanctions. The U.S. and EU would be entitled to enforce such sanctions even if the violations did not occur in America or Europe.
- Fund , together with the EU, an international broadcasting operation by opposition radio and television stations from countries around Belarus, and expand people-to-people and educational exchanges.
- Consult with Russia regarding possible political changes that would make Belarus more democratic and predictable. Such a coordinated effort would benefit Russia by making the transit route for Russian gas to Europe less prone to Lukashenka's interference and would eliminate the need for Russia to support the Belarusian economy with subsidized natural gas at a cost of over $2 billion per year.
Dictatorship in Belarus - Hot Summer 2006
The railway ticket from Baranovichi to Kiev (passenger train Number 459 Riga-Vilnus-Simpheropol, 1-st car, a place # 9) was bought on Antons name but actualy nobody knows who had bought the ticket and if Anton was on that train. It can be a typical belorussian KGB cover-up. More information about Anton Taras is here: http://www.proz.com/?sp=partprof&eid_s=104427
Back in 1999 fourteen-year-old Anton Taras was arrested at the April rally commemorating the Chernobyl disaster, was allegedly forced by police to put on a gas mask he had worn symbolically during the rally. They then stopped the air supply until he began to suffocate, a torture method known as elephant. No investigations were known to have been carried out into allegations of torture or ill-treatment at that time. Following a peaceful demonstration on 25 April 1999 to commemorate the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, police reportedly arrested up to 40 demonstrators and allegedly beat some of them in detention.
http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/aireport/ar99/eur49.htm
Also "Maidan" website reported back in March 2006: "The whereabouts at present of two more members of the Belarusian Association of Journalists Olena Lukrashevich and her son, Anton Taras, are not known. In the morning they set off for October Square. Their empty car was found parked on one of the adjoining streets." It turned out they were arrested and received 11 days sentences.
The Belarusian Association of Journalists (http://baj.ru/indexe.htm) reported that from 14 to 23 March 2006 20 journalists had faced charges involving administrative liability.The overwhelming majority have received sentences of administrative arrest.
http://eng.maidanua.org/node/561
So called president of Belarus Lukashenko, described by Washington as Europe's Last Dictator has been in power in his tightly controlled nation of 10 million since 1994, cracking down on political dissent and the independent media and squeezing non-governmental .
It's interesting that Belarus has got its independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991. A new constitution went into effect on March 30, 1994. The new document created the office of president, declared Belarus a democracy with separation of powers, granted freedom of religion, and proclaimed Belarus's goal of becoming a neutral, nonnuclear state.
The winner of the quickly organized election was Aleksandr Lukashenko. So, basically the first dictator and the first President of Belarus was elected in the first really democratic elections. How ironic and sad it is - dictator Lukashenko was elected democratically back in 1994. After that point any democracy in Belarus dissappeared. Lukashenko got rid of all the presidential candidates (they dissappeared before the elections) back in September 2001 and re-elected himself.
Also his re-election in March 2006 was condemned as fraudulent by the opposition and Western governments and his regime was slapped with U.S. and European Union sanctions.
Nevertheless on July 13, 2006 the former candidate for presidency, former rector of the Belarusian State University Alexander Kozulin has been sentenced to 5 and a half years in a minimum security prison. The politician was arrested during a brutal disband of a peaceful rally on March 25 this year.
Another four people in Belarus have been sentenced for the peaceful exercise of their human rights. Amnesty International considers them prisoners of conscience and calls for their immediate and unconditional release. Mikalay Astreyka, Enira Branizkaya, Alyaksandr Shalayka and Tsimafey Dranchuk, all of them in their twenties, were members of an independent election monitoring group, Initiative Partnership. They were sentenced on 4 August, 2006 to between six months and two years imprisonment for their intention to observe the presidential elections in March 2006.
Europe's last dictatorship
In Belarus, an authoritarian, often forgotten corner of Europe, criticising the president can still land you in jail. So it's no surprise that the forthcoming elections are already rumoured to have been fixed. Nick Paton Walsh reports from the land where the Soviet Union never really went away
Thursday March 2, 2006
The Guardian
Statkievich has to start his forced labour by 8am. This gives him the next hour to drop by his 75-year-old father's flat for a shower, breakfast and to change out of the lavatory grime of his prison clothes. Then Statkievich, 49, a former lieutenant-colonel in the Soviet army - who has the equivalent of a PhD in science - reports for duty at a local shop. He spends his days fixing kettles, irons and radios, and is paid around £35 a month for it. His crime, under article 232 of the criminal code, is: "The organisation of mass events that concern disobedience of the authorities and interference with public transportation." This means he organised a demonstration and it briefly stopped the traffic. For this he was sentenced to three years of forced labour in June last year.
Statkievich's story reads like a footnote to the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel-prize-winning chronicler of the Soviet "gulag" prison camps of the 1950s. His punishment is known as khimiya (chemistry); it was, he tells me during his lunch break, created "in Kruschev's times, when the gulag was dismantled, because there was no one to do the dirty jobs, like work in chemical factories".
But Statkievich is no 50s dissident. He is one of the last political prisoners in 21st-century Europe, an internal exile in the authoritarian - and often forgotten - state of Belarus. Here, the Soviet Union never really went away.
Baranavichy, population 400,000 - the town that Statkievich is not allowed to leave - is only 150km from Poland, the latest part of the old Soviet bloc to join the European Union. But life here seems worlds apart from the democratic west. On October 18 2004, Statkievich led a protest against a referendum held over plans to change the Belarusian constitution so that President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since July 1994, had a right to a third term. The poll's positive result was as predictable as the raft of allegations of fraud and illegality that followed from the west. Statkievich's protest, obviously, failed to overturn the results and so for this he got three years of khimiya.
Belarus's 10 million people live sandwiched between the Baltics and the Ukraine, with their former imperialist master, Russia, to the east, and have learned not to expect too much from history, or from their masters. For centuries Belarus was a bargaining chip between European empires. It first existed as an independent state in 1918, only to be swallowed up by the USSR a year later. Stalin's purges in the 1930s led to at least 100,000 of its citizens being executed and thousands more sent to labour camps. The Nazi occupation and the second world war led to the death of three million Belarusians - a third of its population, a higher proportion of losses during that time than any other country. The survivors were purged again by a victorious Stalin. Belarus was then to bear the brunt of the Soviet empire's ungracious collapse: a fifth of its farmland was rendered unusable by radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
Lukashenko, 51, has played on the country's troubled history. He frequently extols the "stability" that his regime has created. In 2003, he told Belarusian radio: "An authoritarian ruling style is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. Why? We could spend hours talking about this. You need to control the country and the main thing is not to ruin people's lives." In a fortnight's time, after months of careful preparation and repression, Lukashenko, the man the Bush White House has dubbed "Europe's last dictator", will stage a third presidential election, in an attempt to extend his rule to a total of 15 years, making him Europe's longest-serving head of state.
There is a stability of sorts here. Pensions are good enough, the general standard of living is manageable for some. The rest are isolated enough from the outside world not to know better. Nikolai Kazaryan, a part-time driver, lives on £40 a month in a squalid farmhouse outside the capital of Minsk, just down the road from a lavish ski resort where the president has his own luxury chalet. But despite the immense gulf between him and his president, Kazaryan has only this to say about Lukashenko: "Great guy," he grins, raising a thumb.
After the political upheaval and privatisations of the turbulent 90s, Russia enjoys an improved standard of living. Belarus has seen no such changes: 80% of the economy is still controlled by the state, and the state is Lukashenko.
"He's a former collective farm manager, still running the collective farm," says a senior western diplomat, who asks not to be named. "I don't think he's in it for the money, but for the power." The diplomat describes victory in this month's elections as "Lukashenko's big prize, this total dictatorship he wants".
The opposition has pledged to hold massive demonstrations at 8pm on March 19, election day. They say the election has been fixed in advance and hope that by taking to the streets they will spark a repeat of the protest-led regime changes that swept neighbouring Ukraine in November 2004. Their hopes have been bolstered by expressions of support from both America and the European Union, but Moscow - desperate not to see another part of the former Soviet Union turn irrevocably to the west - is backing Lukashenko. The lines are drawn for yet another showdown between east and west.
Lukashenko is said to be nervous about the election, and has more openly been taking steps to isolate Belarus from the viral contagion of democracy. Belarusians have long needed a stamp in their passport to travel abroad; now students need clearance for every foreign study trip.
It's part of a slow clampdown on Belarusian society, one that ranges from the Orwellian to the comical. While "slandering the president" has for years been an offence that carries a prison sentence, in December Lukashenko felt it necessary to introduce a three-year sentence for anyone who "passes false information harmful to the state of Belarus to a foreign state". Meanwhile, fears as to the insidious nature of foreign rock music have led to a law that means 75% of music on radio stations must be Belarusian. All models that appear in advertisements inside Belarus are, according to a new law, supposed to be Belarusian citizens.
An instinctive reaction to such batty Soviet excess is to snigger. But in Belarus it is no joke. Underpinning the wackiness is a coarse current of fear.
When I try to watch the first televised speech of Alexander Milinkevich, the main opponent to Lukashenko in the presidential vote, in a popular restaurant in the centre of Minsk, two young women next to me tell me it is spoiling their conversation. Eighteen minutes into the 30-minute speech, the manager appears and asks me to turn it off. Despite my arguing that the speech is on state-run television, so cannot really be the "political agitation" he suggests it is, he insists I hand him the remote control.
"In his heart, maybe he wanted to watch me," Milinkevich later tells me, in the back of his campaign minibus. "But business is so tightly controlled here that he might have feared losing money. Self-censorship is the strongest weapon."
For the most part excluded from the media, Milinkevich has resorted to travelling Belarus in a white minivan with his wife Inna and a few of his 20-strong campaign staff by his side. The day we meet, he is driving three hours to a campaign meeting in the eastern town of Orsha, where about 100 supporters and a handful of police await him in the snow. He has little choice but to campaign at a grassroots level. The only remaining opposition paper in Belarus, Narodnaya Volya, has been forced to print in Russia and is now distributed in blank, brown paper envelopes to prevent it being intercepted.
State TV is prone to depicting the outside western world in outlandish diatribes. (One recent TV documentary, according to BBC Monitoring, accused the US of funding Nazi Germany, adding that Coca-Cola had dreamed up the Fanta recipe to "quench the thirst of German invaders".) Domestic news is almost as heavily distorted, with Lukashenko seen as the great benefactor of his people, pushing a land of plenty to new heights. Yet Milinkevich believes that the electorate, home-schooled in the Soviet era to trust nothing that state TV offers, can see through it all.
The streets of the capital, Minsk, are almost unnaturally clean and conspicuously devoid of advertising. A few token placards flog international brands, but are matched by government information adverts. (A typical police poster says, "We are always near you" - something any former Soviet citizen will read as a veiled threat.)
The price of even mild dissent here can be high. Lubov Kuchinskaya says she was a veterinary student on a scholarship until February 7. Then police searched her dormitory, and found opposition posters. She started failing her exams for the first time and was thrown out of university. In Baranavichy, where Statkievich is exiled, Alexander Dolmut tells me he lost his job as deputy director of a sewing factory because of his politics.
State workers - the vast majority of people - are now employed under contracts that have to be renewed each year: naturally, this tends to enhance their political loyalty. "Sack three people and 100,000 are scared," says Statkievich.
Alexander Svirid is deputy chairman of the parliament's committee on human rights, and the only official put forward to meet me during my four-day visit. He says he has received many calls since Milinkevich's TV speech from angry voters asking why the state allowed such "slander of the president" to be broadcast.
From inside the hushed and dusty corridors of Minsk's parliament, it is hard to see what change the ballot box could bring about. Asked to define democracy, Svirid says: "I learned at school that democracy was power to the people. In my understanding, democracy means the authorities must come to power by democratic means, fulfil the will of the people, and direct society. There is no talk of opposition."
He says the opposition courting foreign support and finance "was essentially a form of terrorism, interference in the internal affairs of another country. Today you support the opposition, tomorrow you're fostering terrorism."
I ask if he means that the jovial, mild-mannered Professor Milinkevich is in fact a terrorist, and he quickly recants. "No, no. He is not even a hooligan. He is a good, normal, obedient guy." But, he says, "constructive criticism" of Lukashenko is the way forward. "If people are patriots and love their country, they should not support the opposition, but their president."
So far, so ominous. But there are areas of Minsk where dissent is thriving. A queue is forming on a Tuesday night outside the city Orange Club - named after the colour of Ukraine's revolution. Owner Pavel Kashirin lets people in one by one, checking their surnames off on a list. Inside, young people drink, smoke and, quite probably, if they are sure no one is listening in, talk revolution.
Lyavon Volski is usually lead singer of the opposition-minded band NRM, but tonight is moonlighting with the group Krambambula. Their songs boast lyrics such as "tanks are on the streets, and [a statue of the founder of the KGB, Felix] Dzherninsky is in the square", warning of a backslide into totalitarianism.
There's no official ban on NRM, but it only takes a phone call from the police for the director of the concert hall to cancel a gig, says Volski. "This country reminds me of the USSR in miniature. Now is the time for people who got C-grades at school. Everyone talented has gone abroad. But if I did not think democratic forces could triumph, I would have left long ago," he says.
I ask if Lukashenko's crackdown may work against him. "I don't think it was a genius move, as only in one year this popular culture" - he gestures around him - "has produced a lot of seeds." He stops himself, grinning. "Sorry, I am taking a risk here because of a law on the defamation of the state. I would not want to damage the honour of our president."
Others have less to lose. Svetlana Zavadskaya's husband Dmitry, a journalist for the Russian channel ORT, is one of four people known as Belarus's disappeared. In 2000, he vanished after reporting that the Belarusian authorities might have been aiding Chechen separatists, and she has not seen him since. Three other men, a former interior minister and two politicians, also disappeared at the same time. Now her life is devoted to their son, Yuri, 14, and to exposing Lukashenko's authoritarianism to the outside world. "I have one message for Putin," she tells me. "Your historic, dangerous support for such a regime is a shame that compromises Russia internationally."
Her campaign is gathering steam. Last year she met Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, and the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. On February 27, Zavadskaya and another widow of one of the disappeared met George Bush at the White House. Spokesman Scott McClellan said the US president had expressed "his personal support for their efforts to seek justice for the disappeared and for all those who seek to return freedom to Belarus". He added that the US had concluded that the Lukashenko regime had murdered Dmitry Zavadsky.
Zavadskaya has experienced both the government's brutality and absurdity. At 6pm on July 7 last year, she and dozens of others gathered in October Square in central Minsk to commemorate the fifth anniversary of her husband's disappearance. The riot police attacked the demonstration. One policeman ran into her, another punched her in the face, she says. Then prosecutors were told that she had attacked the two riot policemen. The case against her, or the police, was never pursued, but she is still subjected to regular, silent phone calls.
"My son, Yuri, gets ideological lessons at school," she says. "They make his class watch films that show Lukashenko as the father of the people, in the farm fields. But I don't worry. Yuri says the class all laugh. My son sees everything here with his own eyes so there's not much need to explain anything to him."
Yet not all the bleak absurdity can be instinctively laughed off. One day she will have to explain what happened to Yuri. "I think he understands that his father is not coming back. But we have never spoken about this, and that conversation will be hard".
No comments:
Post a Comment