Belarus!

[welsh]

So finally the US and the EU agree on something.

But will it make a difference?

The EU and America put sanctions on Belarus's leaders

Mar 24th 2006
From The Economist Global Agenda

The European Union and America will impose sanctions against Belarus's political leaders, including President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who won a landslide victory in a rigged election last week. The EU and America also deplored the use of riot police, who broke up peaceful demonstrations in the capital, Minsk, on Friday. But Russia, more influential in the region, refuses to criticise its ally

Yes, because it's hard for crocodiles to criticize other crocodiles for being crocodiles.

Expect another color revolution? I think it best to think again.

THOSE hoping for democracy in Belarus know that it is unlikely to come quickly. Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the incumbent autocrat, romped home in a presidential election last Sunday that many observers said was rigged. There followed criticism from opposition parties at home, and grumbles from the United States, western Europe and other democracies. A few hundred brave protesters took to the cold streets of Minsk, setting up tents in a public square.

Mr Lukashenka held back for a few days, but finally sent in riot police to disperse the protesters early on Friday, though they promise to gather again soon. The same day, leaders of the 25-member European Union, meeting in Brussels for an economic summit, agreed that some form of sanctions will be imposed on those responsible for rigging Belarus's election, including Mr Lukashenka. Though all the details are not yet clear, these will include some sort of travel ban and may include freezing assets held by Belarusian leaders in the EU. The United States followed suit with similar sanctions. The crackdown on protesters was also condemned.

Seize those assets baby! But again, will that do much except make other places (like a Persian Gulf bank).

Mr Lukashenka is known in the West as Europe’s last dictator. He won a massive 82.6% of votes cast in the election. With his egomaniacal gestures, his moustache, comb-over hairstyle and oddly squeaky voice, He might almost be funny―were he not also a brutal autocrat. Formerly the manager of a collective farm, he was elected president, on an anti-corruption ticket, in 1994. He quickly set about ensuring that the relatively honest vote that brought him to power would be his country’s last. In 1996, a rigged referendum extended his presidential term and neutered parliament. In 2004, another fixed plebiscite changed the constitution to let him remain president indefinitely.

Hey but they had elections! They got a constitution!
Yeah, but it doesn't matter if its a sham.

But the worst abuses of Mr Lukashenka’s presidency came between the referendums, in 1999-2000, when two politicians, plus a businessman and a journalist, disappeared; others vanished too, some allege. That is, the worst abuses until now. Before the election the screws were tightened. Training people for street protests, and discrediting the country abroad, were made illegal. Dissident students were dismissed from universities. People were arrested simply for holding candles in public, a silent protest staged on the 16th of each month, the date of two disappearances. A stream of opposition activists, including top aides to Alyaksandr Milinkevic, the main opposition candidate, were arrested in the few weeks before the vote. The media was utterly suborned.

Kharn you are the resident russophile, your thoughts?

That is one difference from Ukraine, where Viktor Yushchenko, now the president, enjoyed at least some favourable coverage during his election campaign and the subsequent stand-off. Another is the use, in Belarus, of violence. There was a foretaste of it on March 2nd, when Alyaksandr Kozulin, another opposition candidate―learning from Ukraine, most opposition factions united behind Mr Milinkevic―was assaulted, along with several supporters and journalists.

To a politician like Mr Lukashenka, all this counts as legitimate campaigning. Another mark of his Soviet mindset is that only an overwhelming victory would do. His 82.6% was partly due to a fraud-facilitating system of early voting, plus one-sided electoral commissions. But the truth is that Mr Lukashenka could probably do without all the ballot-stuffing. So saturated by propaganda is Belarus that, even if the counting were honest, he would almost certainly have won.

A big part of the president’s appeal is negative: as he and the media constantly reiterate, in Belarus there has been no post-Soviet war, and no terrorism. But, in fairness, Mr Lukashenka has had some positive achievements―foremost among them being the so-called “Belarusian economic miracle”. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, Belarus has received vanishingly little foreign investment, and privatised little. Taxes are high by regional standards. Ancient heavy industries and collective farms are propped up by subsidies; the president sets targets and berates his ministers on television if numbers disappoint. And up to a point, it appears to work. Official unemployment is 1.5% (though some say there is much hidden joblessness). Other ex-Soviet countries are still poorer than they were under communism; Belarus is richer. The statist economy is also Mr Lukashenka's main mechanism of political control. State employees work to one-year contracts, and are liable to be fired if they rebel, or refuse to sign pro-presidential petitions.

Makes you wonder if official numbers are perhaps inflated?

Revolutions can happen in divided nations, as events in Ukraine proved. There Mr Yushchenko defeated Viktor Yanukovich, the regime-backed candidate whom eastern and southern Ukraine overwhelmingly supported (and still do, as the parliamentary elections on March 26th will show). Like Ukraine, which had almost never been an independent state until 1991, the land that is now Belarus was always dominated by other powers: Russia, but also Poland and the old Duchy of Lithuania.

But the part of its history that seems to have most shaped the sensibility of Belarus are the wars that have been fought across its invitingly flat land. The second world war killed around a third of Belarus’s population. Before and after it, Stalin’s purges were severe. The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, in 1986, contaminated a fifth of the country. The legacy of this wretchedness is the powerful third force of Belarusian politics: a sort of apathetic adaptability, which is as quietly evident in the villages as the pro-Lukashenka enthusiasm.

And I wonder about the political power of the weak masses. How active are they really, or are they mostly just disenfranchised?

Revolutions need money: somebody paid for the floodlights and free food in Kiev. In Belarus, there are no oligarchs to bankroll the opposition

Understanding this legacy, Mr Milinkevic emphasised the peacefulness of his campaign. But Mr Lukashenka understood it too. And he allied the allegations of coup plots and terrorism that he levelled against the opposition with another old complex: anti-Americanism. America, which has labeled Belarus an “outpost of tyranny”, would indeed like to see Mr Lukashenka dislodged. But it has little influence in Belarus; the EU has more, but not much. Recent history has shown that, to help democratic forces in post-Soviet countries, the West needs both the means and the motives to do so. In Ukraine, it had both; while the role of foreigners there has been over-estimated, they did help to prevent violence. In Azerbaijan, whose government rigged a parliamentary vote last year, energy considerations trumped democracy-building. In Belarus, there is little the West can do, however much it wants to.

Thus the EU and the US might bitch and moan, but it's Putin that calls the shot.

There is, however, a country that can do much more. Belarus―and Mr Lukashenka―subsist on cheap Russian gas, having been spared the price hikes recently imposed on Russia’s other neighbours. Belarus also imports Russian crude for lucrative refining, and exports products to Russia that would struggle to find markets elsewhere. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, could probably defenestrate Mr Lukashenka if he wanted to. And there have been signs that he might want to: in 2004, after the Belarusian leader irked the Kremlin, Russia briefly turned off the gas. But Mr Putin doesn’t like revolutions, nor intrusions into what he considers Russia’s sphere of influence, and an important buffer between it and the NATO military alliance. He has stood squarely by Mr Lukashenka this week.

And afterall, Belarus might make it if it rides on the coattails of a Russian economic revival.

The good news is that, young (51) as he is, and theoretically entitled though he is to remain president indefinitely, Mr Lukashenka’s regime is unsustainable. His elderly supporters are dying; in the internet age, and with democratic neighbours to the west, his information blockade must crumble. The “Belarusian miracle” also cannot last. Mr Milinkevic says that the newly united opposition will “stay together until victory”.

But underlyings can be replaced, so maybe Luka has little reason to fear.

Tough life being a democratic protestor.

 

[citizenkhan]

What I love about this situation is that about 45 white people are being fucked with by a government and all of a sudden the White House gives a shit. However, when a storm rolls over a city of 290,804 African-Americans the White House barely bats an eye. It's absurd. Darfur needs a little help, too.

 

[welsh]

Yes, and let's ignore the rest of the world because black folks have issues.

Duh, haven't you realized a bunch of white folks in Europe are much more important than ten times that number of black folks in Africa?

Did you just completely miss that- we intervene in Yugoslavia but ignore Rwanda, thing some years ago?
Did you not get the whole- we need to bash Saddam for being a tyrant, but we can leave Charles Taylor in Liberia, thing?

Black folks in Dafur? Fuck, dude, the white house doesn't really care about black folks in the US.

 

[citizenkhan]

That was kinda my point.

 

[Pajari]

Did you not get the whole- we need to bash Saddam for being a tyrant, but we can leave Charles Taylor in Liberia, thing?

Saddam wasn't oppressing blue-eyed Aryans. Just sayin'.

 

[Ashmo]

Sandniggers are only ebonic by name. Just saying.

 

[Brother None]

Saddam wasn't oppressing blue-eyed Aryans. Just sayin'.

Oil.

 

[Silencer]

To spice things up, the Belarussian police might - or might have not - killed the Polish Vice-Consul, Ryszard Badoń-Lehr.

3rd April 2006

Diplomat in coma

From Warsaw Business Journal

Ryszard Badoń-Lehr, the Polish Deputy Consul in Grodno, Belarus, is in a coma after he was found unconscious in his home in Grodno.

The Attorney General is currently investigating if Badoń-Lehr was beaten up - doctors found marks on his body that could have been caused by a stun gun. Aleksander Milinkiewicz, an opposition candidate in the recent presidential elections in Belarus, did not dismiss the involvement of Belarusian authorities.

http://www.wbj.pl/?command=article&id=31427&

An update on that is that Badoń-Lehr died in hospital today as result of head trauma. Chances areequal he fell or was hit with a blunt object. Such as a police baton.

I say liberate and stabilise.

 

[[Rusty Chopper]]

THOSE hoping for democracy in Belarus know that it is unlikely to come quickly. Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the incumbent autocrat, romped home in a presidential election last Sunday that many observers said was rigged. There followed criticism from opposition parties at home, and grumbles from the United States, western Europe and other democracies.

Yes, because it's hard for crocodiles to criticize other crocodiles for being crocodiles.

What are you waiting for? C'mon, invade Belarus *today*!

Liberate the oppressed!

 

[Silencer]

How about you guys join us? We'll just split along the Berezina river Trust me, it's a good offer and approved by First Comrade Ratty.