OSCE Unbound

What the Irish Should Do On Their Watch at OSCE

 

Ireland is now the chair-in-office at OSCE, and I imagine in some quarters, there is a certain sigh of relief, after the chairmanship of two post-Soviet nations. First, there was the awful chair of Kazakhstan, which did nothing to improve human rights in that Central Asian country. Then there was the better, but still problematic chair of Lithuania, which made some strong efforts on press freedom in particular, but left the unfortunate legacy of not only a president who hoped Lukashenka would win the elections in 2010 to maintain stability, but a bank that complied with the outrageous request of Lukashenka's henchmen and abetted the unlawful prosecution of a leading human rights defender, Ales Bialetski.

Irish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Eamon Gilmore has already presented what his country expects to do during their term in 2012. 

First, there's "the inclusive approach in tackling modern security challenges." I'm really not schooled enough in OSCE-speak or EU-speak to understand what this really means -- and I hope it doesn't mean caving to things like Russia's demand for a new negotiated OSCE charter or a brand-new security architecture or over-arching concept for OSCE that doesn't include what Andrei Sakharov called the "indissoluble link" among peace, progress, and human rights.

Then, there's this, which all sounds fine:

Emphasizing that “the continuing threat to fundamental freedoms and human rights in a number of OSCE participating States is a cause of real concern,” Deputy Prime Minister Gilmore said that the full implementation of OSCE human dimension commitments by OSCE participating States is a top priority. A specific area of focus during the Irish Chairmanship will be the importance of protecting freedom of expression in the digital age, and working with civil society organizations and business to safeguard these freedoms online.

The media focus picks up from the best work of Lithuania during its tenure on giving a high profile to the issues of protection of journalists and defense of free speech online. I do hope this doesn't involve sliding off into issues of the copyleftist's agenda to undermine commerce and intellectual property rights online, through opposition to anti-piracy legislation or promotion of baggy notions of "net neutrality" and all the rest of it. These are distractions from the real core set of issues for online life in the OSCE countries that most violate basic free speech norms.

Then the Irish Foreign Minister had this to say:

A further priority for Ireland will be to seek ways to make progress towards lasting settlements of protracted conflicts in the OSCE area. Deputy Prime Minister Gilmore welcomed the resumption of the official 5+2 talks in the Transdniestrian settlement process, and offered his full support for the Minsk Group Co-Chairs to address the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and for the Geneva Discussions dealing with the August 2008 conflict in Georgia.

“We in Ireland know all too well the devastating cost of conflict.  Through negotiation, compromise and the dedication and imagination of the two Governments involved, and leaders on both sides of the divide, a lasting settlement was achieved in relation to Northern Ireland.”

I think it's wonderful that Ireland's truly valuable and hard-won experience in conflict and its resolution will be brought to bear on the protracted "frozen conflicts" of OSCE. But countries large and small, rich and powerful or poor and weak, have come and gone in OSCE in the chair or as neighbours, and they all failed to solve these long-standing conflicts.  I think it's safe to say that Ireland, even with its very best efforts, is not going to resolve them, either, and it won't be its fault.

These conflicts -- all of them -- at a very basic level have to do with the central problem of Russian aggression and imperialism. That is, sure, they're complex and they involve blame on both parties in the conflict and they have been coiled and convoluted and more about themselves at times than about the Kremlin. But there is no question that if the Kremlin changed, if Russia changed, then these conflicts would change dramatically, too.

I'm sure Ireland will give its best shot to these conflicts, but mindful of the very experience that the Foreign Ministry cited, I want to suggest another important task for Ireland: taking on Kazakhstan.

Here's the thing. The US, with all its power and might, can't seem to take on Kazakhstan. Remember this awful Congressional hearing?

Remember when, on the eve of its chairmanship, Kazakhstan said this, and nobody challenged it? (It sure sounds chilling now):

Just recently, on the 29th of January [2010], in his state of the nation speech, President Nazarbayev launched a massive program of legal reforms, which is aimed at bringing Kazakhstan's judiciary closer to international standards. This year the Parliament will adopt a law that stipulates total public and legislative control over the activities of the law enforcement. This signifies our ongoing work to further strengthen the protection of rights and liberties of our citizens.

Maybe too many Kazakhs have bought out too many US congressmen, journalists, think-tanks, etc., sometimes for a song. Maybe the US is just in too deep with Kazakhstan because it needs oil, and because 100 percent of the traffic for the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) ferrying supplies to the war in Afghanistan goes through Kazakhstan now. Maybe it's because China is buying up a lot of Kazakhstan in the form of shares in enterprises, and the US is terribly in debt to China.

Russia isn't going to take on Kazakhstan, either, despite its large fellow Russian population there -- or because of it -- and due to Moscow's aspirations for the Eurasian Union and Customs Union that Kazakhstan and Belarus have already joined with Russia. Russia doesn't take on its allies, anyway, but is highly selective or even tendentious in its application of human rights-related intervention.

Ireland really then does have a role to play now vis-a-vis Kazakhstan, in starting to undo some of the harm that OSCE and its betters did in enabling Astana to become the chair. There's no question in my mind that the impunity that Nazarbayev gained by being handed that extraordinary gift -- and the summit as well -- are part of the circumstances that made it possible to shoot workers dead in Zhanaozen.

As far as I know, Ireland doesn't have the problems of the US and some other European countries where Kazakh lobbyists and business people and former and present officials go around buying some people and bullying others, sometimes with lawsuits. So Ireland should definitely take up the case of Zhanaozen, and invoke the chair's prerogative for talks, and the Moscow mechanism, and any other OSCE thing, to demand a full, credible and impartial investigation of these horrible events -- and prosecution of those at the highest levels responsible.

As I've noted, Nazarbayev has been very clever in pretending to invite the UN in to investigate -- but not really. Headlines talked about an open invitation, but it really was only under consideration by the Foreign Ministry. Journalists and human rights investigators have been blocked from the area. We still don't have all the information from these events, and the labour unrest that stretches back over the last year. While authorities give an official death toll o f 16, there are Kazakh civil society activists continuing to give the higher number of 46, as yet without a list of names, and possibly even more (eyewitness reports compiled by Elena Kostyuchenko of Russia's Novaya Gazeta gave a figure of 67 in December, which has not been confirmed).

What matters is not a numbers game, but an investigation. And that takes more than NGOs, it takes states.

The experience of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, where troops shot dead 26 people, affecting the course of events dramatically for decades afterward, has some similarities (although important differences) to the events in Zhanaozen.

There is no question that when government troops fire on unarmed demonstrators, the break in trust with the government, already absent when people are desperate enough to demonstrate, fuels further violence on both sides and is difficult to end.

In the case of Bloody Sunday, an important role was played by American lawyer Sam Dash, who performed an investigation for the International League for Human Rights at the time of the events. He obtained independent forensic evidence that showed that some people were shot as they crawled away from the scene and documented crucial victims' and eyewitness reports; he produced a report titled "Justice Denied", challenging Lord Widgery's report of the era. Years later, the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair opened a Bloody Sunday Tribunal under Lord Saville, and struggled to cope with the testimony and the evidence (helped by Prof. Dash's report) -- and are still coping (the report was published in 2010).

All of these efforts point to the importance of validating the victims' narrative; documenting and publishing the reality of what happened; coming to grips with the need for acknowledgement of guilt and apology.

In an environment where figures like Lord Fraser, chairman of the British Kazakh Society and a member of the House of Lords, are contemplating "How Kazakhstan Can Continue Its Success Story" and minimizing the tragedy of Zhanaozen, the willingness of this particular chair-in-office to keep publicly asking about investigations and accountability for Zhanaozen will be crucial. It could be among Ireland's greatest contributions to OSCE and to the people of Kazakhstan.

 

Does Human Rights Advocacy Work?

Joshua Foust has been raging for weeks on Twitter, in the Atlantic, and his blog Registan about the human rights crowd and their protests against Uzbekistan's dictator Islam Karimov -- who yes, was known to boil his opponents (and now freezes them?). Is human rights advocacy not only a futile but a dangerous activity that threatens even national security -- the vital supply route to troops in Afghanistan? Are we therefore to stand down and cease our complaints about Karimov's atrocities in the name of some greater good, involving...fighting the Taliban, and then going home in 2014?

That's apparently the proposition and it's worth debating. It's worth debating even in some other form that Foust -- who is a very cynical and nasty debater shifting his ground frequently -- is likely to claim it's really all about.

YES, THE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT NEEDS CRITICISM

First, let me say that I think the human rights movement could do with a lot more criticism than it ever gets from serious interlocutors, i.e. not from right-wing hate blogs but intellectuals who share liberal values, let's say, but who have serious reservations whether the idealistic project of human rights is worth it, or has any effect, or does more harm than good. (I have always said that if politics is the art of the possible, human rights is the art of the impossible.)

The human rights movement not only suffers from the "halo effect," i.e. it's work is so religiously important and self-evidently good that it seems beyond criticism itself, it also suffers from another religious tenet, the "11th commandment," which is: "Thou shalt not ever criticize another NGO publicly."

A LATE 20TH CENTURY SECT

I think these religious doctrines should be abolished and there really should be more debate about the efficacy of the human rights movement and its ideals. Although I've participated in this movement myself ardently in various forms for the last 30 years, I've sometimes wondered if 100 years from now, some historian may describe the human rights movement as we know it today as a kind of sect, inspired by the great Aryeh Neier at the turn of the 20th century (and a number of these ideas, such as outspoken protest despite geopolitical necessities, as with the Soviet Union, for arms talks, or the notion of "surrogate advocacy," come from him). It's funny to think of some future scholar writing curiously about that flurry of human rights NGO activities from 1974-2014 as a kind of Burnt-Over Place, like New York State in the early 19th century. Most of the world isn't a human rights movement -- quite the contrary.

The problem is, these organizations tend to debate about policy and priorities only internally, and sometimes not at the staff level at all but only among senior officials and board members, and then have a set piece once they make up their minds, that they don't subject to debate in part because hostile governments might  more successfully challenge them and undermine their work.

RIEFF IS THE ONLY ONE

David Rieff is one of the few critics -- only critic? -- of human rights organizations and their idealism, although most of his writing has been about the futilities and fallacies of humanitarian work rather than human rights work per se, which differs, although he does continually makes a helpful if savage debunking of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine (which I am a critic of as well, see my reply to Gareth Evans.) But as a rule, human rights as a project is so internalized in governments themselves nowadays and of course enshrined in the International Criminal Court, that there is little debate about whether it's an effective method (I can only think of Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia which I've only just started.)

PEACE UBER ALLES

This is not a new debate -- the proposition that this frenzied human rights protest should be held back while more urgent matters are addressed.

Back in the height of the Euromissile crisis, when a much larger -- mass -- world movement was lobbying for reduction of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe (and a minority within this movement was even protesting Soviet SS20s in Eastern Europe as well), the peace movement in the US mainly took it as an article of faith that you simply didn't raise human rights protests with the Soviet and East European governments. This was not done. Not only did the peaceniks believe our own government was as bad or worse than these communist regimes, with racism and poverty and wars abroad; they thought the crisis of reducing nuclear weapons so overrode any other concerns, however legitimate, that they simply had to be triaged. You had to keep silent.

E.P. Thompson, of course, was one of the peace activists who discarded that notion of silence and vigorously protested the East bloc's human rights crimes, whether the jailing of pacifists or the invasion of Afghanistan or the crackdown on Poland's solidarity.

EAST VS. WEST, PEACE VERSUS PROTEST

In the early 1980s, Aryeh Neier had a meeting with John Mroz of the Institute for East West Studies and they argued over whether the new Helsinki Watch, as it was then called, should vocally protest Soviet human rights wrongs -- Mroz felt surely this would endanger peace talks and strongly advised against it. Aryeh disagreed. The rest is history. And the early board members and staff of what later became Human Rights Watch mounted vocal protests about human rights violations in the Helsinki talks. It's hard to remember now that this was truly the debate then -- and an urgent problem for many civic organizations as well as government figures involved with the USSR.

If I -- and many of my colleagues -- didn't think condemning the Soviet Union's jailing of dissidents and invasion of Afghanistan would harm nuclear arms talks, for God's sake, why would picketing a president's daughter's fashion show threaten or stop the delivery of goods to troops in that same Afghanistan today?

In fact, if anything, what we learned in the 1980s and 1990s (although seemed to forget by about 1997) is that you cannot have fruitful arms talks and trade agreements and peace with regimes that have no civilian oversight and restraint on their militaries and on the corruption of elites. This was the premise of Andrei Sakharov and his friends although this integral relationship between arms control and human rights seems hard to convey nowadays. And by extension of the premise today, you cannot expect that cooperation with Uzbekistan for strictly pragmatic delivery options, much less something as ambitious as the State Department's Silk Road plan for post-conflict recovery, will ever really be authentic and successful if there aren't basic changes in the nature of the regime.

RAINING ON GOOGOOSHA'S PARADE

In The Atlantic, Foust complained about those of us who picketed Gulnara Karimova's fashion show. (I write for eurasianet.org and also cottoncampaign.org). It seems a perfectly reasonable and necessary protest to me -- you couldn't say it was about being nasty to cultural and design people unrelated to politics because a) Gulnara is an ambassador of her country to Spain and to the UN  in Geneva;  b) she was reportedly associated with Zeromax, a now-bankrupt state conglomerate with brought profits to the state and allegedly to the Karimov family;  c) cultural events like this are used by the regime in propagandistic ways to influence public opinion and recruit supporters.

Foust not only found this futile; he found it misguided and strongly implied it shouldn't have been done, and human rights condemnation should be left to officials -- presumably quietly. Many of these same human rights groups and labour unions picketed the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce (AUCC) conference with both US and Uzbek officials and corporate executives in attendance for the same reasons: that 's what protestors do, they find symbolic targets and call the press and march with their signs, you know, like Occupy Wall Street does? Or is it not OK to do it about foreign governments the US needs in its wars? I'm not getting any of this.

Foust's fury seemed all out of proportion to the issue at hand -- as if it was somehow politically incorrect to spoil Gulnara's big do in Manhattan. But she represents an oppressive state and more directly, she shows off fashions made of Uzbek cotton, and this is picked by hundreds of thousands of school children in the largest state-organized forced labour program in the world. Why can't we protest this any way we can, peacefully?

ALLEGED MORAL FAILINGS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

Foust's lashes out at all aspects of this story:

o the protestors didn't show up last year when Gulnara was in Manhattan at the same Fashion Week Show -- and then he links to my story from last year -- and therefore the implication is that they are opportunistic and not consistent in their moral outrage

Answer: We didn't know exactly when she was coming last year, and we had much less notice of her appearance last year. Indeed, I had to write about it *after* I saw mention of it in the fashion press.

o Foust then asks "why now" given that it was "long-scheduled" this year (again linking to my story).

Answer:  Human rights groups didn't have the exact time and date and confirmation she was coming, although she was mentioned in press releases -- then it was found on the Mercedes Benz website later. And they did protest, but the organizers didn't want to undo it. The protest was advertised on NGO websites and planned for weeks before her arrival -- but that alone did not make the organizers change their plans to host Karimova.

We had no idea when we planned the picket that it would actually lead to Karimova being cancelled -- it seemed an impossibility at the time, given that she'd already appeared the previous year and was on the schedule. Nor was the amount of press attention expected -- I thought the entire episode might get a wire service report.

FASHION SHOW ORGANIZERS CHANGE THEIR MIND

Frankly, I think when the Uzbek emigres appeared on the very first day of Fashion Week with their protest, and the labor groups announced they were going to picket Gulnara's show then later (which was the following week), the organizers decided that it was going to look very bad for them to be associated with child labour in this fashion. They may not have felt this way when it seemed more abstract. Certainly the very hard-hitting Daily News Article helped a lot.

It isn't at all the case that "only when the press shines a light on" do people gasp. In fact, these human rights groups are what got the issue press in the first place! It just took time. Last year, they didn't have enough of a run-up of notice, and the campaign had taken awhile to attract companies to pledge not to use Uzbek cotton -- now there are 60 of them.

SURROGATE ADVOCACY

o Foust says:  "It's no secret Uzbekistan abuses its citizens. So why do we only seem to get outraged with Uzbek human rights abusers when they publicly associate with our fellow Westerners?

Answer: because that's how the "surrogate advocacy" formula works. This is how human rights groups work their advocacy. They can't easily get at the target of their outrage, the Uzbek government, especially if that government is doing things like kicking out Human Rights Watch, so they go to those who have a relationship with that government, or even support it in some way, morally or politically or financially. This is an age-old formula used by many protest movements and shouldn't itself be targeted for indignation -- although I'm happy to debate as to whether it is inappropriately used or overused at times.

And I might add that whereas once, Human Rights Watch might have just gone about its business documenting bad things in Uzbekistan and publishing the results of its research on its website, and submitted reports to various EU or UN committees or commissions, once the worst happens, and it can't even function normally in a country, then understandably, its researchers are going to talk more to the media, even an unnatural interlocutor like the Daily News.

Foust says "it's not as simple as a senator or even organizer saying 'I disapprove of your human rights record.'" Well, it is. You work at getting senators to say that. Eventually, if you have enough of them, you don't then have something happen like the Senate Appropriations Committee deciding to put in language in the foreign operations bill to lift sanctions that had been in place for 7 years -- when there is no improvement in human rights. Yes, each senator expressing disapproval counts, that's politics, and that's how human rights advocacy works.

A Sound of Thunder -- Trials in Belarus, And What Journalists Get Wrong

 

This week I've been going around to different people with the title "ambassador" or other government officials, and even if they aren't directly relevant to Belarus or Eastern Europe or OSCE or Eurasia, I've been raising the case of Andrei Sannikov and others on trial now in Belarus to try to get awareness raised. That's about all we can do.

Poor Andrei -- I remember when he organized some demonstration around the Belarus elections in September 2001 -- only to have 9/11 completely wipe out any attention to it. He and his friends were arrested in December again with fraudulent elections -- and the revolutions in the Middle East cancelled out the attention they were just starting to get. Just when there was a lull in the revos, and I thought perhaps we might get journalists and officials to look at Minsk again -- whoops, there was the Japanese tsunami. 

Then, when we got the word that his case was transferred to the court -- oh no, the terrorist attack on the Minsk metro. There was no hope of getting any attention.

"Please, dear God," I prayed on Easter Sunday and Monday.  "Don't let there be any world event that drowns out the trial of Andrei, please let's hope we can get news coverage for it."

My prayer fell between the cracks of the world, this time -- Andrei's trial came, and Osama bin Ladn was killed. I couldn't believe it. The killing of OBL!

Andrei Sannikov -- the butterfly, that when you step on him, a hurricane occurs half way around the world...

And like an ominous Bradbury, Deutscher is elected instead of Keith...

What infuriates me about the situation in Belarus is how you cannot get intellectuals to care about it. I mean, besides Tom Stoppard and those he has organized, of course. But I mean most people. I don't mean that you can't get them to do something. That I understand. We suffer from too many atrocities in the world and it's understood you can't "do something" about all of them. Everyone has to think of Libya or Japan first. That's ok. I mean something different. I mean the inability of people who *can* care about far-off problems even if they can't do something about them *not caring for reasons of some sort of deep cynicism and ennui about Belarus*. That's eerie.

Let me try to explain. I was at a meeting last night listening to a refugee official talk about how 10,000 people have drowned in their boats coming from North Africa to Italy. Everyone in the room gasped in horror. Few will be able to do anything about it, or will try to do anything about it -- everyone has their causes and their preoccupations, perhaps Libya, perhaps Roma, perhaps pregnant teenagers in New York. But still, they gasped. They are intellectuals. They are do-gooders. *They care*.

But trials in Belarus -- it's as if we're in some kind of bad dream, the kind where you find you can't run, or all your clothes are missing, and you can't cover yourself, or you are surrounded by a kind of plexiglass. It's really awful. You can't get people to care, even though it's just like the dissident show trials of the Soviet era that could turn out demonstrations of hundreds if not thousands.

I write to one journalist friend who does development work to ask about Belarus. And he comments, "the same tired voices of the opposition engage in their same tired antics."

And that's someone who knows where Belarus is, who cares -- except he doesn't. There's something about Belarus, its opposition, its troubles, that incites horrible cynicism, defeatism, and even hatred of the victim in people who are normally not like that.

Why?

Why?!

A woman confessed to me that she had never heard about Belarus or thought about Belarus, and then went to see the plays of the Belarus Free Theater and was so impressed. Thank God for Kolya and Natasha, they have put Belarus on the map in a positive and creative way in a fashion that no one has ever been able to do.

The Belarus Free Theater has a play called "Numbers," with the terrible statistics of Belarus enacted -- the large number of women trafficked, the high number of abortions, the high number of sick children, the disappeared -- politically-related and otherwise. At the end, the screen rolls a list of names of famous people. Famous Nobel Prize laureates, scientists, writers, actors, film stars, professors. It turns out they are all people from Belarus. People you didn't even know were from Belarus (Larry King, Kirk Douglas). And what many of them have in common is that they are Jewish, and they or their families were forced to flee pogroms. I saw a painting of Chagal and thought about him in Vitebsk, and his teacher murdered in the horrible year of 1937. People fleeing Nazis or fleeing Stalin -- but lots of people with roots in Belarus for whom it was primarily an awful place you had to leave. Where your brilliance would have been stamped out. Where the butterfly would be stepped on, the dinosaur shot, and the sound of thunder...

Maybe that explains that animus to Belarus.

I remember sitting with a lawyer in New York years ago who told me his family fled pogroms in Belarus. And thinking to myself that his surname was the same as one of the chief henchmen of Kuropaty. I didn't know what to say and so I said nothing. A butterfly was stepped on.

So now comes Edward Lucas' article, "What the West Gets Wrong About Belarus".

And I'm sorry, but I'm going to sound off, and sound off hard. And I don't care if that earns me a reprimand on Facebook from my FB friend, Edward Lucas himself, in a "friend" chat, that I shouldn't engage in "personal attacks" (by which he means that I said that I thought it was disgraceful).

Honestly, on the week when Sannikov and others in the opposition movement are on trial? Filing an article in which you complain that there is no Havel in the Belarusian opposition, that it is "rag-tag," and that the West should engage in trade with the regime *is* disgraceful. Truly, it is. I wonder once again: what does it take?!

Lucas claims -- falsely! -- that the West has over-estimated the Belarusian opposition. Huh? The West has not even paid attention to the Belarusian opposition. Except for a few State Department and OSCE officials, there's been almost no outcry. You might get a tweet from Carl Bildt -- that's about it. There is no grave pronouncements about the "heart of Europe". There's silence. It's not RealPolitik. It's NoPolitik, or perhaps it's an appendix of RusPolitik which involves ingratiating the Kremlin.

The convenient category that Lucas claims other people are cramming Belarus into is in fact his own. He finds the opposition unimpressive -- and I suspect it's precisely because they don't cut the noble nationalist figure of a Polish Solidarity union fighter or an Orange Revolution leader in Ukraine. He finds them unimpressive -- and I suspect it's because they aren't as vivid and well-covered and urbane as the intellectual dissidents in Moscow.

I think he just hasn't spent enough time with them as I have. I will never forget a conference I went to in Moscow about 10 years ago -- but all the same cast of characters are still active, in both the Belarusian and Russian oppositions -- all exactly the same. And what a difference!

On the Russian side of the round table, sociologists with scraggly beards, holey sweaters, sociologists by training, now living off Western grants in NGOs or think tanks (and that's fine by me -- do what you can to keep them alive and don't disparage them). On the Russian side of the table, dissidents-turned-parliamentarians or opposition leaders, some who had been political prisoners in the past, people who never really had a "real job" since they were kicked out of their institutes years ago.

And on the Belarusian side of the table, attorneys still in the bar; professors still teaching in institutes or recently fired from them but in NGOs -- NGOs that put out twice the publications of their Russian counterparts; professional journalists still struggling to run newspapers -- ironically at that time, *and even today* (!) there are more independent papers in Belarus, even under their conditions, than there are in Russia (amazing to think, really). Educated people; professional people. People in business suits, not cardigans. I realized that the Minsk opposition was simply a cut above intellectually and professionally than their counterparts in Moscow, and yet had not one-tenth of the financial or more importantly moral support of the West.

I've got an awful lot of time for dissidents in holey sweaters working on sociology projects to this day, 25 years after they typed their last piece of samizdat. But I have to say that professional lawyers in Minsk and professional journalists seem to fill in the ranks of the demonstrators far, far more in Belarus than they do in Russia -- and yet get no credit from their counterparts in Europe and the US for this feat.

Lucas makes no sense, really when he claims the West "got it wrong" if it viewed Belarus under Shushkevich, shedding its nuclear weapons (with Sannikov's direct help as deputy foreign minister responsible for this portfolio!!). Um, what did the West get wrong? Belarus was on a different track. That it was crushed was directly the responsibility of the Russian military, that sent a general to Minsk when the Supreme Court was declaring the closing of the parliament as unconstitutional. These details seem to be forgotten, if they were ever known. The speaker of the parliament is *disappeared*. That's what it *took*. This is not about the West; this is about the brutality of the Russian security machine in cahoots with the Belarusians.

Lukashenka coming to power isn't just a function of "popularity among former collective farmers" or some such tripe, it's about forces with force -- guns, weapons, bombs -- who can keep the oil and gas industry flowing toward the West. This is not about looking over the border from Belarus to Russia, and seeing, as the Belarusian ambassador once bizarrely told me, "odni oduvanki" -- as if Belarus was spared the deprivations of Russia after reform (as we can see from its parlous state today, it hardly was).

Lucas is right that for a time the State Department did imagine that the Union of Belarus and Russia was some kind of "force for progress" But he must not realize the enormous power of the figures from Polonia and the Captive Nations lobby in influencing this policy and even implementing it as officials. This was a short-lived phenomenon indeed under Condi Rice. And the US moved to a different concept which was to make a list of "incremental steps" and carrots and sticks that they used to try to inch Belarus along a road of something like "EU accession". Want military exchanges? Release these prisoners. Want more trade? Leave those newspapers alone. That sort of thing.

It didn't work at all. The KGB laughed. They had the US literally over a barrel. Russia was flush with oil money.

No one *ever* thought *in Russia, where it counted* that Lukashenka could become a leader *of Russia*. Has Lucas ever sat in endless meetings with Belarusians and Russians in Moscow, as I have discussing theories like this? I recall going to Moscow for a series of press meetings with the four candidates (at that time) in the Belarusian presidential elections. We met with Yegor Gaider; we met even with Surkov (the Kremlin's grey cardinal) at that time. The theory of the "Lukashenka as head of the Union who will use this like Milosevic in Yugoslavia to take over" was completely laughable to anyone in Moscow. And indeed it was. It had absolutely no legs. Not in Smolenskaya oblast. Not anywhere. A few Belarusian journalists and oppositionists floated the idea in Minsk -- but it was never, ever taken seriously by the State Department, or what matters, the Kremlin.

There's also no serious analyst who has bought the idea that Lukashenka makes for a good Kremlin stooge. That just has no basis. Does Lucas ever sit with Russian journalists and discuss these things in Moscow? The Kremlin is eternally unhappy with Lukashenka, but it's one of those "he's our bastard" problems. They shut off the gas and the credits. They send the officials to read the riot act. They give the credits, because they haven't got a better idea and perhaps the old dissident notion that they use Belarus as a polygon to practice their own badness has some sense. I recall watching the notion of the vertikal being perfected by Lukashenka, then migrating over to Putin. Not that it needed a Belarusian inspiration, as it could be said to harken back to tsarist and Soviet times...

And here's where I clutch my sides and Laugh Out Loud. Now Edward Lucas says with a completely straight face, that after dropping the "Russia as reformer of Belarus" idea or "Lukashenka as king of the Union" concept, "the West started thinking hard about how to topple Mr. Lukashenko"

Ridiculous.

Has Lucas ever said in an NED or USAID meeting and seen the miserly budgets doled out to Belarus? Which West does he think was going to topple Lukashenka! Um, me, with my fictitious "$211,000 budget"?! Where? What West?! There wasn't any West toppling Lukashenka with any money, unless you imagine that Counterparts passing out AIDS pamphlets, covering up the dissidents' literature on the table of a thoroughly scared opposition party, counts as "toppling".

Again -- disgraceful, quite frankly, to even write such things. No significant amounts of money even faintly resembling those given to Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia were EVER made available for Belarus by ANY party, government or private. It's just not the case.

Here's what Lucas writes:

As the repressive climate in Belarus became harsher, the West started thinking hard about how to topple Mr. Lukashenko. More mistaken labeling was the result. The focus of Western support was the Belarusian opposition — a ragtag mix of idealists, has-beens, never-weres, turncoats, nationalist extremists and eccentrics, who were to their delight, but to little effect, showered with money, training and supportive propaganda. Throwing money at the problem was meant to replicate the experience in Central Europe in the 1980s. Money helped Solidarity topple communism in Poland. Radio broadcasts had been hugely effective in bringing the message of freedom to the captive nations. Surely the same combination would work in Belarus?

What a crock. Charter 97, the organization that has put out daily updates in three languages for some 13 years, is hardly a "rag-tag". Sannikov is hardly a "has been" or a "never was" as deputy foreign minister and leader of this impressive operation that dwarfs in skill and traffic and content many similar Russia sites. Nikolai Khalezin's Live Journal blog "Kilgore Trout" has 40,000 people a day visiting the site.

Does Edward Lucas have that much traffic on his site at the Economist?

I can't put it more starkly than that. I don't think Edward Lucas has really studied these people or been to their country or spent any significant time with these people if he believes they are losers.

And again I view this as a moral issue: the leader of the opposition, the best known candidate abroad (Neklayev gathered more votes inside the country but was less known to Western governments and journalists), someone who organized and maintained the chief news site of Belarus, is on trial, and it is not a time to be disparaging the opposition calling them a function of Western grants (when outside support is part of their indictment), and calling them never-wases and has-beens, like one of the most despicable articles in the Belarusian still aptly-named Sovetskaya Belarus.

Why does Edward Lucas feel he has to sound like Sovetskaya Belarus?!

It makes no sense.

Then this:

After 15 years, the results are embarrassingly scanty. None of the opposition leaders has emerged as a charismatic, credible leader similar to Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel. It is true that they faced a difficult fight against a nasty regime. But the dissidents of the communist era still managed hugely impressive feats of organization and mobilization. Nothing of the kind has happened in Belarus.

What's "embarassingly scanty" is Western support -- and I mean substantial financial support which hasn't in fact been forthcoming, and serious political support. What's embarrasingly scanty is Western policy -- it's been absent or completely weak and divided. Having Poland agree begrudgingly to have a Belarusian-language station operate on its territory ostensibly to serve the Belarusian diaspora in Poland (a political cover as a sop to Russian pressure on Poland) is hardly the sort of robust political action I mean. That station should have broadcast more widely, and not only in shortwave, which people can't get on car radios, and it should have had Russian too. For ideological reasons, it didn't. And that is the recurring problem with programs to help Belarus -- a foolish reliance on Belarusian language only; a foolish reliance on Poland which is only half-hearted and only supportive of some kinds of Belarusian opposition; a foolish refusal to tackle the problem in Russian, with Russian speakers, in Belarus, and in Russia. Where the problem originates.

Interestingly, Lucas does concede that the Belarusian language should not have been relied on as the vehicle of opposition. But he goes way too far in trashing it, saying it was "irrelevant and harmful". Again, has Lucas gone to Belarus lately? (I haven't, but I listen to a lot of Belarusian radio stations and talk to Belarusians frequently and read their blogs and press.) The Belarusian language was almost an exoticism when I first visited dissidents in the Soviet era in Minsk in the late 1980s. It was used as a rarified language of dissent, a literary language for urban intellectuals to re-learn and use in literature as a form of dissent, and a language spoken by peasants that their children wished to overcome when they moved to the big city and began speaking Russian exclusively.

Even 10 years later in the 1990s, the mission to the UN began to conduct all its correspondence in Belarusian, more and more officials began to actually speak Belarusian, and TV and radio, even officially controlled, began to permit more and more Belarusian. More and more Belarusian opposition papers and groups that had once only used Russian began to publish in two languages. So the language has made a comeback, and is in a very different place than it was in the 1980s or 1990s when Lucas may have last really looked at this situation and thought about it.

To be sure, nationalists are still a huge problem in their insularity, especially nationalists who are more nationalist than thou and insist on Belarusian language exclusivity as you find at RFE/RL. Their insistence on Belarusian exclusivity is atrocious, and their disparagement of the opposition goes so far as to beg the question as to whether it is KGB inspired.

While I'll be the first to ruthlessly criticize Polonia and certain European institutions that foster the Belarusian nationalism/Belarusian language concept  (and were behind the BNF-controlled Milenkevic candidacy), it really goes way too far to accuse those young people of wishing to restore the Grand Duchy of Litva.  That's just nuts. They aren't that nuts. They're extreme, they're out of touch, but they aren't nuts.

As for the critique of the Eastern Partnership -- that's low-hanging fruit. Yes, the EU has this all wrong, all across the board. They can't stand up to Russia, and they devise these elaborate placebos of dialogue and technical assistance. The US is little better with its vapid USAID programs. Everywhere, revolutions, first in Eurasia and then in the Middle East. Nowhere is there a revolution in USAID, which still thinks that digging wells or picking up garbage is what needs to be done in countries. Even the UN has a better handle on elections and human rights, thanks to Kofi Annan's mainstreaming of human rights concepts and principles through the programs of all UN agencies in the 1990s. Nothing like that has happened at USAID. You find USAID officials kicking dissidents out of their programs and cringing if any thing they think anything critical about the host government ever finds its way to print attributed to them. It's cowardly; it has to change. It will change.

So let's review Lucas' recommendations:

o "a dose of Western humility". But the West isn't really the problem. Russia, massive force, massive cynicism, and brutality backed by oil purchases is the problem. The West can try this or that policy. None of them mean anything until they stand up to Russia and cease buying Belarusian oil -- and Russian gas, if it comes to that.

o Boycott, boycott, boycott. Every single kind of program or perk or relationship has to be severed. Only force is what can be understood by this sort of brutal and bloody regime. It's like Zimbabwe, not Ukraine. I'm astounded at Lucas counseling trade and engagement (like the fluffiest minded Eurocrat) with a regime that has just brutally arrested 600 people and then put 60 of them in jail for long terms and scattered all independent institutions to the winds, with the most brutal cynicism. There is absolutely no reason in hell to be strengthening this regime one iota. Does Lucas read charter97.org or even RIA Novosti? The regime is staggering, and forces other than lovely Western trade incentives may wind up removing Lukashenka. Then Lucas will be on the wrong side of history -- where he has never been.

No. That's not a regime you trade with. Ever. All engagement bets simply have to be called off. Any call to the opposition not to boycott the parliamentary elections is reprehensible, given what has happened to these people in the opposition who ran in the elections in good faith.

The OSCE mission to Minsk was expelled after the December elections. That means ODIHR should send NOTHING. Not even a small observer mission. NOTHING.

I'm well aware that because I have a diametrically opposed view to this situation than Edward Lucas, that like some Internet interlocutors, he will begin distracting from this divide by saying the problem is that I am making ad hominem attacks or being shrill or being unrealistic.

No, I'm being moral. And he is not. That's a shocking thing to say about someone whom I've always thought to be one of the moral pillars of Europe. It's meant to be.

What's so awful about Edward's proposition is that in fact, it was already tried. What the hell does he think Europe has been doing for the last few years? It's delivered the weakest of reprimands and has engaged, engaged, and engaged some more. Germany is the top trader after Russia. Austria has significant trade. Europe indeed has been doing just what Edward suggests -- and not doing what he claims (toppling Lukashenka).

There are only two things that can really save Belarus:

o an end to reprimands of the opposition for being divided or "rag-tag" or sucking up grants -- none of those things are bad. And unconditional moral support to a brave people who are fighting the fight of conscience that we in the West have been too timid to fight. Full stop.

o boycott of oil sales and other significant trade with Belarus. Full stop.

I marvel that Edward is talking about visa bans. Huh? Visa bans are already in place. They achieve nothing. The foreign minister isn't on a visa ban; he should be.Until Sannikov and others are released.

The one practical point Lucas makes helpfully is about the senior people with investments in Austria, and the prospect of getting Austrian banks to do something about this (under political pressure). That's unlikely, when the chief NGO activist supporting the Belarus Free Theater is against boycotts and largely campaigns by getting us to think positive thoughts about how we will be walking in a free Minsk by Easter (oops that passed) and posting pretty Belarusian pictures on Facebook.

Boycott, boycott, boycott. Otherwise, it is the sound of thunder...

 

 

 

 

"Hang in there, President!" The Trial of Andrei Sannikov

 

A Stalinist show trial is underway in Minsk, our friend and colleague Andrei Sannikov is on trial, and it's like some kind of bad dream -- nobody seems to be paying attention, and it is almost hard to believe it is happening.

Sannikov, who ran for president lawfully in the December 19 elections and lawfully called for a gathering of people on the public square to protest the fraud in the state-rigged ballot, is on trial unjustly, charged with organizing public disorder. The real public disorder in Belarus is the shockingly bad management of dictator Aleksander Lukashenka, who has lurched Belarus into a deplorable Soviet-style reprise of harsh political and cultural controls and a miserable economy. I suppose it's telling that Lukashenka has flown off to Ashgabat today, possibly in search of a quick tractor order or some other infusion of capital into his sagging regime, as Russian bail-outs haven't proved sufficient.

There's a strange and persistent socialist meme to the effect that Belarus somehow provides "a minimum" to people that they'd risk losing in Russia or Ukraine, and that explains the popularity of this madman. No. Force explains their support, and intimidation, and terror.

It's just awful looking at the picture of Sannikov in a cage -- they put people in cages in court while they are on trial, as if they are wild and dangerous animals. He looks grey and grim -- as you'd expect someone to look after four months in prison, after a brutal beating in which his leg and head were injured when riot police put a shield on top of him, then jumped up and down on it.

It's sickening for me to write about what is happening to my friend. Years ago, when Andrei, who has fought for preserving Belarusian independence, was beaten up by the RNE (Russian National Unity), the Russian nationalists, and he sent us pictures, so we could try to get attention to this outrage, it didn't occur to me that it could get worse from the Belarusian state itself. It was bad enough. They ran the place like the Soviet Union -- but not like under Andropov.

That changed -- after the brief spring of the pre-election campaign when the candidates flourished and had many followers and public speeches -- with the brutal crackdown the night of December 19. The authorities have utterly trumped up the case of "violence" -- it makes me spit.

What's most awful about this is that we see numerous revolutions in convulsions through the Middle East, with people routinely picking up stones, sticks, wire, smoke bombs, etc. -- and using them. Cars burning. People hurling smoke bombs and pitching rocks. Bandaged heads. And no one complaining among the ecstatic Western liberals about violence, about destruction, about incitement. There's a terrible tolerance of these routine forms of demonstrators' violence stopping shy of guns, as if it  is ok, somehow, "in self defense".

But all it took in Minsk to put out the mendacious claim of "the opposition advocating violence" (which even the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights fell for) were...a broken door and window. That's it. The claims of injured policemen appear to be evaporating at these show trials. The claims of finding the sticks and smoke bombs in the square don't seem to hold up. There were LOTS of videos of the events, professional and amateur, and there seems to be provocateurs breaking the windows of the building with the electoral commission, and meanwhile, the opposition leaders in fact calling for maintaining order and keeping peaceful.

Among the many outrages of the trial session which opened yesterday was the calling to the stand of a representative of McDonald's fast food restaurant in Minsk (!). I  inevitably recalled Thomas Friedman's claim that no two countries that both had McDonald's could be at war with each other.

But as I long ago commented, taking a picture of an OMON riot policeman standing next to a Ronald McDonald at a restaurant in Minsk, a country with a McDonald's can be at war with itself...

Supposedly, McDonald's suffered losses during the demonstration December 19 -- although riot police broke it up and it was long over by dawn -- and one can't help thinking that if anything, the restaurant had more, not less business. Even if it were blocked for a few hours on a Sunday night, surely the damages can't be in the millions -- and there's just something wrong with this picture...

There's so much more, I couldn't begin to write about it. Dmitry Bondarenko, one of Sannikov's close colleagues and friends, with whom I also met many times, was already sentenced to two years of prison yesterday. He simply acknowledged that yes, he had come to the square -- but that's not a crime.

What's been awful about all this, waking up and thinking of Andrei in jail every day, is the feeling of helplessness. There are so many other things in the world -- the tsunami in Japan, the crackdowns in Syria, the birth certificate...it's hard to get anyone to focus on this old-fashioned Stalin kangaroo court, harming innocent and decent people.

I really had to get in a fury today when a European (I did him the kindness of calling this Romanian in France a European which he appreciated) was bleating about the death penalty for Mumia...the death penalty that isn't coming to pass because the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Nobody needed the prodding of Heinrich Boll for this to happen; it's a system that works. I certainly won't endorse the death penalty; but a violent Black Panther creep like Mumia, convicted for killing a policeman and gaining fame as a radio journalist from his prison cell, is not someone I'm going to shed the slightest tear for. That's what fascinates these Europeans -- anything where they can get to kick America.

And meanwhile, right in their own back yard, right in the heart of Europe, as some often say, an intelligent and decent man who organized the main independent website and opposition movement in his country is facing five to fifteen years in prison FOR NOTHING.

How can they let this pass? How can any of us? I will be the first to say that I haven't done enough. The petitions, the letters, the American gestures -- these aren't going to matter anyway, even though we should keep doing them.

All that will matter is a European boycott of Belarusian oil (the US has already declared a boycott), and a standing up to Russia on this, full stop. Jozef the Austrian was warbling for weeks about how we would walk in a free Minsk in Easter. Somehow, the Easter bunny wasn't hopping on the ploshcha. We had quite the knockdown debate in his Facebook group about my call for a boycott (which the US has already supported -- but that's because it doesn't have much to lose). Jozef thinks this is "ineffective" just "like the Cuban embargo" (sigh -- these European leftists, hopeless, hopeless). Worse, he thinks its harmful -- and some of his friends argue this even more strenuously. It's uncanny how they can't seem to accept -- and haven't for years and years! -- that the Lukashenka regime itself is what is harmful, and must be stopped, and cannot be "dialogued" with anymore.

I'm actually not for keeping the Cuban embargo, and think that Cuba should be love-bombed by peaceniks like the Soviet Union was in the 1980s -- that helped support informal movements and set the stage for dismantling the tyranny. And that's what we need to do with Belarus.

But that 30-year-long economic sanction is a very different thing than a short-term boycott of Belarusian oil to get Lukashenka to release his hostages -- pronto. Russia would understand this; it understands little else.

I want to write more about the things Andrei is saying -- his noble statements, his courage in the face of the awfulness. He was always determined this way. Like a lot of East European dissidents, he always said he wanted to live in a normal country, he wanted his sons to grow up in a normal country...

I can see vividly the bookshelf in his home. He showed me copies of a magazine I used to help out, "Problems of Eastern Europe". He had other samizdat books -- the sort of books sent out by the International Literary Centre. All those years we all sent books -- and it seemd hopeless. But Sannikov and others like him read them. They *lived* the "problems of Eastern Europe". And now there isn't enough backing for them from the powers that be -- but worse, the intellectuals who should know better. With the exception of Tom Stoppard, the playwright, and some theater people around him such as Jude Law, there has been little attention to Belarus. It doesn't capture the imagination for Europeans the way Palestine does.

You would think there'd be more than some Czechs and Swedes and Norwegians caring. Sannikov served as deputy foreign minister in the Belarusian government in the 1990s, and was instrumental in having Belarus give up its nuclear weapons to Russia, which was the deal when the Soviet Union broke up -- for security reasons.

And the deal was this -- as Andrei reminded US officials like Strobe Talbot and Steve Sestanovich again and again when I accompanied him to meetings -- in exchange for giving up their nukes, these countries were supposed to have a guarantee of their independence. That sure has been hard to maintain, as Russia threatens gas cut-offs and continues to bully the region. Lukashenka in fact is seen as a kind of dysfunctional "better Kania than Vanya" sort of figure (remember that slogan?!) -- except they wound up with not even Jaruzelski -- but someone far worse, a kind of fascistic clown of youthful vigour who seems to have endless energy for evil. Four people have disappeared in Belarus, all prominent figures -- and of course our friend Oleg Bebenin was found dead under suspicious circumstances last September.

I must admit that with Oleg's death by hanging -- a hanging none of us believe he committed -- I had a mixed view of the Belarus electoral campaign -- I felt coming to power wasn't worth *that*. And yet, it's precisely because of *that* that Andrei and his friends did try to come to power -- and you know something?

That's ok. That's what you get to do in an election, if you believe your party and your social movement can do better, and you are registered and you are on the ballot.

Maybe I am naive as some Belarusians -- when I saw Andrei and his wife, journalist Irina Khalip, and their little boy Danya, go to the ballot urn as Andrei cast his ballot, they seemed so happy, they were smiling and joyful, I didn't think it was going to end so horribly, with Sannikov broken and hurt on the snowy pavement, wincing.

I'm galled to see Andrei on the front page of RFE/RL...*for this*. They never covered him while he was working in the NGO movement for years -- the nationalists entrenched at the radios loathe the Russian-speaking European-oriented people like Sannikov who want independence, but also integration with Europe and good working relations with Russia, which after all, is not going anywhere any time soon as their neighbour. It truly chafes me to see RFE/RL put up an interview...with Sannikov in a cage. I guess that's how they preferred him...

It's shameful how badly the election was covered by the nationalists -- or whatever it is they actually are (it's not quite the right term to apply to cynics abroad rooting for the failure of parties in their homeland).

Meanwhile, all through this campaign, despite the snarky bile of the RFE/RL writers, there was an outpouring of support and a huge surge of activism of the candidates in the provinces and in Minsk. It was really quite something to see -- if you watched the youtubes on charter97.org and didn't just read certain newspapers or emigre reports. It's amazing to me and totally inspiring to see thousands of people pouring out their support to Andrei, Dima and others in European Belarus, the name of Sannikov's movement. "Derzhis', prezident!" people write. "Hang in there, President!"

While we can go on writing letters and petitions and personal cards to Sannikov -- his mother, Alla Sannikova, has especially asked for this, there are three things that have to happen:

o Europe must be brought around to boycott Belarusian oil -- as the US has done. That's all there is to it. Nothing else matters. Visa sanctions, reduction in conferencing or dialogue -- no. Boycott.

o Raise Belarus with Russia. It's amazing what a tough request this can be in some quarters, particularly in Polonia, due to the fear of seeming to somehow concede Belarusian politics to Russia. The fact is, the Kremlin already meddles, and for worse. Here's the thing: Russia is not the liberator or the liberalizing factor here (as some naively thought some years ago when they thought the Union might liberalize backward Belarus). Yet Russia has levers of influence and may be able to negotiate the release of prisoners. They must be asked.

o Stop telling the opposition to unite, and to not boycott the parliamentary elections. Anyone counseling independent politicians in Belarus to go back under the knife in fake elections should have their head examined! Respect that they have really had enough of this -- some have spent months and years in jail -- and it really has to stop. The West isn't united about what to do about Russia -- or many other things (Libya, Afghanistan). A beleaguered civil society that is beaten for its peaceful expression should not be further savaged.  Let the boycott roll -- it's the right thing to do. Silly electioneering tech assistance right now is truly obscene, after December 19.

The reality is that the old Belarusian polygon method is in play -- today we are seeing Andrei Sannikov on trial, and only saw Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev on trial in Moscow -- but tomorrow we will see Boris Nemtsov on trial -- and not for 15 days, next year in their elections. The time to put your foot down on Russian oppression is now, in Minsk, as it will all be replayed soon enough if we don't. This is definitely a "for your freedom and ours moment".

Yet the fight for Andrei's freedom deserves to be fought for its own sake. It simply shouldn't stand that a man with the title of ambassador at the Foreign Ministry, a man received by high officials around the world, who has spoken at the UN on human rights, who has many, many colleagues who are ambassadors from around the world, should be going to jail today. That means a lot of individuals have to do their best to find channels of quiet -- and public diplomacy.

And you know something? I'm not at all sorry to be as bitter and as blunt as I need to be on this day, calling out people or countries that I think are being morally cowardly. It's wrong, what's happening in Minsk. It shouldn't happen. That it *can* happen is a function not only of the "last dictator in Europe" but the free world as well, refusing to take a firm stand in the way it matters, not with press statements or fact-finding missions or Moscow mechanisms, but with a boycott -- of any future elections, until Lukashenka and his machine of repression is gone -- and of Belarusian oil, until his mind is concentrated wonderfully.

As Andrei's has been, sitting in prison for many long days, keeping up his spirits despite the pain.

 

The Explosion in the Minsk Metro

Injured Minsk resident helped to an ambulance. Photo by Yulia Kuzmenko, @yuliasssik

Naturally, there's a lot of speculation about the tragic terrorist bombing in Minsk, which killed 12 people at least and injured more than 200, 26 of whom are in critical condition and may die of their wounds. It's terribly distressing to see people lose their love ones this way and feel so helpless and to feel this much horror -- and to hear the new horror of our time, the cell phones ringing from the pockets of the dead people. Our hearts go out to all the families.

Police have arrested a "non-Slavic" suspect but they don't say what his ethnicity is; LifeNews said based on the sketch that he had "a Caucasian appearance." Don't they always!

I have absolutely no special knowledge of this situation, haven't talked to a soul there, and haven't been to Belarus in years, so I am merely speculating like anyone else, that there could be a number of possibilities:

1. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, using the same method successfully used to terrorize in London, Madrid, Moscow and elsewhere, because Belarus is a soft target.

Subway or train bombings make people fearful about going about their daily routines on public transportation, a fair number of people can be killed and injured to sow terror pretty easily, so that's why terrorists use this method -- and can use it anywhere.

Why do I say this authoritarian state that bars people from entry and seems to have police everywhere checking on dissidents is a "soft target"? Well, because it is a soft target -- authoritarian states can become very brittle. It has a porous border with Russia, which means lots and lots of people can come through undetected if they have Russian papers, there is a Union agreement that a visa is not required. And papers may not be even necessary. Border guards and police become corrupt when they have too-strict laws to enforce in poor countries without real economic incentive, and then police or patrolmen become bribable with bottles of vodka or cartons of cigarettes or cash.

Authoritarian countries are brittle in that their citizens are passive and waiting for someone else to do something -- the plaintive cry of the man reported by RFE/RL that "Batka" ("father," the nickname for Lukashenka) will "put everything in order" is a sign of exactly what I mean.

In a country like Belarus where the people are beaten down, citizens may not tend to watch and "see something, say something" -- as an alert Vietnam veteran selling sports goods on Times Square on the street did, when he saw wires dangling from a van, called 911, and averted the bombing of Times Square. Although they are schooled from the Soviet era's culture in reporting on their neighbour, and they can exhibit a certain amount of communal spirit at times, Belarusians aren't   schooled in looking out for another person *out of good will*. They often have none -- and what little they have is leeched out of them by the difficulties of life.

Of course, being a democratic, can-do, altruistic, alert kind of people can't save you from terrorism always, as we saw on 9/11. Nobody is exempt. My point is different: these post-Soviet authoritarian states are easy to commit terrorist acts in because the governments are corrupt and unaccountable; because police and guards can be bribed; because people don't feel it's their responsibility to be protective; because you can easily get the items to make a bomb and bring it to a bomb site and no one might notice or care.

(Notice I'm not saying that it's because...the government doesn't provide enough jobs to end poverty. I don't believe because you're poor you get to blow up a subway; I also don't think that aleviating poverty will prevent the ideological from blowing up subways for other reasons.)

My point is that Islamic terrorists target Minsk or Moscow because they can; because the brittle authoritarianism ironically makes it easier to bend the situation to their evil will; because there aren't enough safety and security deterrents in place that work. These metros might have cameras because they're worried about people's insurrection; they don't have sniffer dogs from the K-9 police unit because they aren't as interested and motivated to protect people.

2. The regime, doing it themselves, to distract from their failing state and increasing pressure from the West to change their despotic ways

Of course, if the regime were to do it, they would hire Chechens or other Caucasians, or just anybody for hire, the "otmorozki" that people think are always guilty of these things, i.e. people who have nothing to lose, zombies, frozen as to morals and empathy.

"The regime itself did it" -- This is the first thing I think of in these countries, and particularly Belarus, mainly because the intelligentsia in these countries always say this. They say this about the Moscow and Tashkent bombings, for example. Even so, if you make this claim, you have to back it up. It requires not only that the regime is willing to kill civilians unrelated to their presumed targets; it means risking that they might lose men themselves.

While I've never been convinced that the Russian intelligence services committed the apartment bombings, although I've read all the conspiracy books, I think this Minsk metro bombing could be the work of the Belarusian KGB.

That is, I've heard Russians explain that the apartment bombings could have become possible under Stepashin, during his brief tenure, because it was bardak on his watch (a mess, a mismanagement) and perhaps rogue breakaway forces could get away with this, or who knows, maybe it was conceived officially but clandestinely. No one wants to believe the Russian government would kill its own people, but it has exhibited hugely callous neglect and killed its own people at Beslan, at Nordost, at other occasions. So it's good to raise the questions, and unfortunately, nearly all those who have raised them with any force publicly are dead, raising *more* questions, but even so, I just don't think that's how Russia works -- even though it did once under Stalin and Lenin.

Belarus is different. Belarus *does* work that way. In modern times, long after Stalin, in the 1990s and early 200s, there are reports that the Belarusian security agencies deliberately went around killing mafia kingpins. They killed dozens of them. They also, while they were going about killing the mafia kingpins, killed at least four political opposition people, which included a journalist -- and may have been behind the premature deaths of a few others. A modern country in Europe -- and yet 4 public figures disappear, and you can't claim their fellow opposition rivals did it. So that suggests government complicity -- and that sets the stage to view an incident like the metro bombing as also involving complicity from officials.

As the independent Belarusian and Russian press reported at the time, those four people who disappeared may have been executed, the way the mafiosi were. The prosecutors who fled Belarus and obtained political asylum in the US did not have direct evidence of this, but they had enough information that pointed strongly to wrongdoing of this nature. There have been other reports by officials have fled and the independent press that claim how the government even formally put these doomed people through the official criminal justice system, signing out the guns used to commit executions formally, but just delivering the vyshaya mera (highest form of punishment -- execution) in secret. They believed they were right to be fulfilling this punishment. Those involved may have been "following orders". Perhaps they even had formal judicial documents. The last thing you think a death squad is going to use is the formal justice system and its formal methods -- you think they'll just go out in the forest or the swamp and shoot people. And yet, that's the story.

This all seemed plausible to me then and so it seems plausible to me now that the Lukashenka government could have engineered this explosion. And sometimes it isn't the opposition or the Chechens, but the Belarusian KGB and other services fighting among themselves, you know?

I'm reminded of how Sakharov felt there was far more that met the eye in the 1972 Moscow subway explosions blamed on Armenians, and he questioned the evidence the government claimed they had. There were those that said he merely took on this cause because his wife, Elena Bonner, is an Armenian Jew whose father was Armenian. But that's just not understanding who Sakharov was; he made up his own mind and had his own very firm ideas and was not the kind to be influenced in this fashion. He reasoned, and he came up with his questioning and his hypothesis. And I find it compelling, and one has to ask, then, looking at how the Soviets may have staged the 1972 metro bombing, whether any other metro bombings anywhere else in the Soviet sphere followed that KGB model. Of course, we may never know.

3. Russia did it to terrorize or demolish Lukashenka or merely keep Belarus in its orbit

This seems pretty far-fetched to me, not because I like the Kremlin or Putin or Medvedev -- I don't. I think the Russians just have much easier ways to control Lukashenka, if that's their goal. They can just not give him the $3 billion they just gave to bail him out of his awful economic plight; they can just not make deals with him; they can just starve him out and help parts of the opposition.  They don't have to kill people in subways -- and in fact, help strengthen his security state.

Of course, it's always possible that years from now, we will discover there was some Russian or inter-CIS clandestine rogue force, or force operating with tacit acceptance, that went around doing things like poisoning Litvinenko, assassingating Politkovskaya, blowing up police stations in Uzbekistan, blowing up the pipeline in Turkmenistan  -- whatever. But it's unlikely to be that methodical and organized. The rivalries and mismanagement and corruption of these forces precisely because they are authoritarian make it unlikely that they'd coordinate that much in order to perform quick hits like this and never be caught.

What's not at all likely so I won't even put it in my list is that "the opposition" in Belarus did this. That's just absurd. For one, what, the regime just rounded up 600 people and kept 60-odd of them on serious charges, many still in pre-trial detention and...they didn't get a potential bomber among them?! That's absurd.

But really, these opposition groups do not use or advocate violence. There have been a few incidences of explosions over the years, in Vitebsk, one in which no one was hurt, another in which people were hurt, but no major or even minor group took credit for it. These opposition groups just bothered to take part in a formal, albeit highly rigged elections. These are not people who throw bombs; they don't even break windows. That's a smear.

Of course, there's a lot of fertilizer in Belarus. Potash is one thing Belarus knows how to do well. And that's a key bomb ingredient for some kinds of bombs. Maybe the reason there is a bomb in the metro in Minsk is the same reason why a congressmen is wounded and a judge and a nine-year-old girl and other people are killed in a supermarket in Arkansas: because it was possible, and because guns are easy to get. Because there are maniacs that do this sort of thing.

One thing we can be sure of: we will not get the truth of this tragedy, just like we won't get the truth of the tragic death of Oleg Bebenin, until this regime and its henchmen are long gone.

Meanwhile, let's hope Europe doesn't swerve from its mission to pressure Lukashenka and get the release of the political prisoners like Andrei Sannikov, Vladimir Neklyayev and others -- even though the EU hasn't done a stellar job of this mission yet, and let's hope Russia can be drawn into the job of trying to send Lukashenka on his way, without putting their own controllers in his place. Not a good situation. A situation into which someone who wanted to bomb the metro in Minsk could easily walk into....

 

Distracting Men's Minds with Foreign Peace?

There's a fascinating story up at The Cable about the State Department doing battle with the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly over a contract to the International Peace Institute (IPI). That is, fascinating if you are an OSCE geek like me and follow the somewhat obscure doings at the unwieldly 56-country assembly, where the politics are almost never covered in the press like this.

At one level, the story sounds like it's about diplomatic pork, a cushy contract for a conference handed to some friends of friends (Marc Perrin de Brichambaut, the Secretary Generay of OSCE itself,  is on the board of IPI). Of course, diplomats can't get very far on pork that has a budget of only $83,400, which might be enough for one or two conferences, given the high cost of dinner, hotel, translation, etc. in Vienna.

But at another level, it's about a lot of other things.

BUDGET-SLASHING CLIMATE IN DC

First, I'm wincing -- ouch, raising *any* budget dispute in *this* climate where Congress is slashing absolutely anything that looks like it might be about "distracting men's minds with foreign peace," i.e. not wars, which they readily approve money for, but things like the UN Human Rights Council. NGOs have already been fretting for months how to admit criticisms of the HRC, but yet convince members to support U.S. activity at the UN (something I totally support myself -- you have to be in the game to win it.)

But if you complain about any one item these days, you risk having *all* funding cut as a particular activity starts to seem shrouded in controversy. I find that exasperating, as these international bodies do need criticizing badly, but trying to convey the subtleties of why they need lots more financial and intellectual support than they get, but critical support is something very hard to convey in a Congressional hearing. Congress should *not* cut any funding for OSCE work -- if anything, they need to realize this is where the international battlefield for hearts and minds is taking place.

Let's remember that it took strong American leadership to get Turkmen dissidents seated at the OSCE Review Conferences last year, for example, and it is the U.S. delegation that takes the lead at the Permanent Council in condemning human rights violations in OSCE member states such as are alarmingly occuring in Belarus now.

But trying to keep the support *with* the criticism is very difficult.

HOSTILE CLIMATE FOR CRITICIZING OSCE

That's something I faced myself in trying to discuss Turkmenistan in a hearing at the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) some years ago -- and at the end, got a reprimand from Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) for criticizing OSCE PA -- a body of which of course CSCE itself is a member -- and in fact, one of the models for membership.

I would argue that not all election monitoring that the OSCE PA does of elections is credible precisely because it has undemocratically elected members -- chief of which is Russia's delegation -- and has opted to monitor some elections that would be better off not blessed by the act of monitoring at all. This is of course the sort of politically-uncorrect truth that diplomats try to avoid saying aloud because it lets you in for an endless wrangle. Yes, Russia's parliamentary elections have been declared flawed by the OSCE Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights  (ODIHR) -- and rightly so. (ODIHR opted not to monitor the 2007 elections when their experts faced obstructions and some didn't get visas in a timely manner; OSCE PA did send an observers' delegation, however (although they didn't go to monitor the presidential election). And I suspect that while conditions have only worsened in Russia, we may not see ODIHR doing *that* again, so furious has the Kremlin been over this characterization, and so busy have they been trying to spin it. Indeed, under Lenarcic, ODIHR has now been criticzed as being too timid, and not sufficiently critical of the elections in Moldova, under Russian pressure. And OSCE PA was rapped for its statement of being "delighted" by the Moldovan elections which brought Communists a landslide victory.

MORAL EQUIVALENCE MAGNETIC FIELD

BTW, because of the inherent magnetic field of moral equivalency that always vectors this debate, I have to add this: Making this statement about the inherent flaw of the OSCE PA -- that it has undemocratic members who are state cronies -- doesn't somehow bless the U.S. as a system free of flaws. I find that whenever you try to have this debate, someone is sure to start barking about how the U.S. itself is flawed, and that the 2000 election in particular was suspect. (Indeed, Rep. Hastings commented pointedly that OSCE didn't monitor those elections, and should have been more critical, and enthused that Russian monitors in the 2008 elections were some of the greatest people he had ever dealt with).

You don't have to somehow be unwitting or not admitting of the flaws of American democracy, the need for even-handed monitoring, and even the warmth of Russians even from an undemocratic system to be entitled to criticize the obvious about Russia: with the use of "administrative resources" by incumbents, with the media controlled, with journalists killed or maimed, with NGOs terribly pressured, with demonstrations about basic rights crushed by police, with constant violations -- like one of the former parliamentarians put in jail for 15 days (Boris Nemtsov), and ultimately with no liberal caucus, even a tiny one, remotely possible -- it shouldn't be so hard to criticize Russia's elections as unfair. But it is, for all kinds of lingering Cold War reasons, not the least of which are actual people with actual old line pro-Soviet views in the U.S. Congress as well as in OSCE PA. They were also terribly soft on Kazakhstan and other Russian allies as well.

RUSSIA'S ASSAULT ON OSCE

If you want to understand the real context for this story of a rather modest contract going to a Western-friendly think-tank, read what Vladimir Putin said in Munich in 2007:

They [unnamed Western States] are trying to transform the OSCE into a vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries. And this task is also being accomplished by the OSCE's bureaucratic apparatus, which is absolutely not connected with the state founders in any way. Decision-making procedures and the involvement of so-called non-governmental organizations are tailored for this task. These organizations are formally independent but they are purposefully financed and therefore under control. 

Project much? Kazakhstan, carrying water for the Kremlin, rammed through the Astana security summit with a reluctant West (and Eastern Europe) and packed the review meetings with its own state-funded NGOs -- and also limited the space for critical NGOs at the summit itself.

Those few NGOs that still bother with OSCE -- mainly the remnants of the international Helsinki movement in Europe and the former Soviet Union -- are mainly credible groups making the right judgement calls on unfair and unfree elections in CIS states.

DEMOCRACY BEGINS AT HOME

There's much more to this issue, as Josh Rogin's story indicates. Spencer Oliver is absolutely right to question this no-bid contract without any competition.

But Spencer Oliver himself has been in power at OSCE PA for 22 years, and before that had a distinguished career at CSCE for 22 years. I'm all for continuity and institutional memory, but one has to ask, when first OSCE PA decides to extend the General Secretary's term to 5 years and then re-elects the same one, and then when that same gen sec is re-elected unanimously for three more five-year terms, whether we aren't dealing with a kind of Brezhnev situation (although of course the presidency of OSCE PA does rotate more frequently).

Even so, can the OSCE PA ever have anything but unanimous votes for the Secretary General? Does anybody else ever run alternatives for the post for Secretary General at that outfit?Can this body, that is always pointed to as the hope of the democratic will of the people, have more frequently changing management than, say, the presidency of Uzbekistan? Just saying.

Trust me, I realize that precisely because OSCE PA *isn't* democratic in part due to its undemocratic Russian, Kazakh, etc. delegations and the aggressive Russian campaign to reshape OSCE that there is powerful reasoning for making the argument (and a sizeable contingent for making it): better to keep a seasoned American in place, better not to rock the boat, it can and does get so much worse in OSCE, and we could end up with a Russian crony running operations who will undo all this body's good works.

Ok, but sooner or later, the bullet has to be bitten, and better to bite it sooner rather than later. Then...those of good will in the OSCE PA need to find good, democratic, fresh candidates; and they need to get more serious about not seating delegations that are not elected under undemocratic elections so that their overall institution has more credibility. Instead, they could seat non-voting observer delegations from oppressive states with unfair elections that they can recognize as made up of both the phony parliaments and the opposition. (There is some precedent for doing this with the forcibly disbanded Belarusian parliament for a time.)

UPDATE:  As Spencer Oliver rightly points out in a comment on The Cable in response to my blog and comment, the Charter of Paris of 1990 mandates that OSCE PA has to be made up of parliamentary delegations from each state. Yes, I get that they are stuck with having to take whatever delegation, even one made up of state-controlled rubber-stampers, that a state sends. Yet what I'm saying is that they need to get serious about changing that. How? They could work toward changing the Charter -- *gasp* although no one ever dares tamper with non-binding charters from this non-legal entity *cough*. That's because they might get something worse -- and I respect that. But the notion of "getting something worse" is predicated on the West remaining supine. Must it?

If Russia wants to get a security charter of Eurasia redrawn, maybe among the prices the West can ask Moscow to pay is an amendment that in order for a a delegation from a country to get seated,  ODIHR and OSCE PA must declare an election free and fair. Yes, it's a shocking concept that seems unrealizable, until you start going after it, step by step. Furthermore, shy of an unlikely Charter amendment, you can try other things -- guest delegations from significant oppositions who have failed to democratize parliaments because elections are flawed or hopelessly restricted; hearings in which opposition party leaders and human rights NGOs can speak, and so on.

These are the kinds of questions that I would expect someone like Walter Kemp, whom I don't know, might examine at the IPI, an organization I am familiar with from its New York branch.

And one thing I do know: if we cannot float a hundred even unfeasible proposals including even some that don't appear to be fact-based, we will never be able to get the momentum to reform this failing organization.

WHICH PART OF OSCE REPRESENTS THE BETTER DEMOCRATIC WILL OF NATIONS?

When I questioned OSCE PA at the Turkmenistan hearing back then, I said that at times, ODIHR better represents the will of the people, i.e. because some of the delegations in OSCE PA are not democratically elected, therefore ODIHR, if it follows a human rights mandate, can compensate for that and actually represent the genuine will of states. He objected to my characterization of ODIHR as "the will of the people," as obviously it is an executive body made by states -- and of course some of these states are very oppressive -- how can you speak of the "will of the people" in talking about countries like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, or Turkmenistan?! That was the implication.

Of course you can't, and Rep. Hastings and others have been on hand to call those non-elections for the shams they were, and that's why they obviously do good work. It takes time and space to unpack the argument for "why ODIHR" and "why not OSCE PA". It has to do with idealizing the role of institutions sometimes to bring them into being as that ideal -- and facing the harsh reality that OSCE PA has plenty of unfairly picked delegations from authoritarian states who are not democratically elected.

My contention about ODIHR -- which I realize is rather a slender reed to place the hopes of "the will of the peoples of the OSCE upon -- is that it is an institution created with a mission specifically devoted to monitoring human rights and elections -- and one created in better days, when Russia and its allies were not so disruptive and destructive. The 1990 Copenhagen Act, for example, on freedom of association and democratic elections, even though signed by the Soviet Union before the coup, was signed by a Gorbachevian Soviet Union in the era of the flourishing nyeformaly that was better than today's Kremlin when it comes to freedom of association. So it stands as a high water mark of "the will of states" that one hopes is not eroded by further debate.

So in that sense, *when* ODIHR is hewing to an impartial, specific human rights mandate under the norms of Copenhagen and the other framing documents of OSCE values, *then* it is "the conscience" and "the will" of the people, in that idealistic fashion. That may have been a bridge too far to attempt to convey in the minute answer you get in a Congressional hearing, and I failed -- as I may fail now in trying to write it out -- because it needs probably 6000 more words of "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" describing the highs and lows of ODIHR over the decades -- and some lows have indeed been low, and real democratically-elected parliamentarians like Rep. Hastings are right to call them out. It really depends on whether one is sort of invoking "the soul of ODIHR" -- what it has been and could and should be -- or "the body of ODIHR," which can be how it actually performs in this or that situation (and obviously, if Putin is unhappy with how ODIHR has been doing its job, frankly, that may be a strong indictator that it *has* been doing its job *right*).

The problem of ODIHR is exactly the one faced by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. When Mary Robinson held that office, she once remarked that she had 192 bosses, many of whom did not wish her well in her mission. ODIHR's head is in exactly that kind of unenviable position, albeit with only 56 bosses -- because the same countries who obstruct progress at the UN obstruct it at OSCE.

HOW CAN REFORM BE BROUGHT ABOUT AT OSCE?

But here's the thing. We never get to have these sorts of open and frank discussion within the OSCE context itself about who is obstructing whom. There isn't a place on the agenda, really, and there aren't even the self-correcting mechanisms that the United Nations has been forced to put in to examine itself after the Rwanda genocide and the Oil-for-Food and other scandal.

If you gave a bid for this much-debated State Department contract, the fact is, probably few would be qualified to take it up in a serious, professional matter. With two or three exceptions, there are no academics who bother to study the OSCE seriously. There are very few existing NGOs that bother with the OSCE enough to sustain conferences -- as someone who has been involved in organizing NGO conferences on the OSCE, I could point out that this problem tends to reinforce itself: because there are no academic centers already taking this up seriously such as to partner with NGOs successfully, NGOs risk just staging one more noble but ignored activity in a sea of think-tank events in Washington, some of them paid for by the very abusive governments (like Kazakhstan) that they'd like to critique -- with far more market share in the policy-making attention economy.

So if a review panel were set up to look at the IPI OSCE project, they might indeed fairly conclude that "no-bid" though it be, this contract was awarded the best way that it could be, to a group already established with a very good track record on examining the United Nations.

Now we come to the tangled web of what is an NGO, what is a GONGO, what is a State -- and of course in our increasingly Snowcrashian world, with new media able to circumvent (Twitter) and undermine (WikiLeaks) states, it's hard to tell them apart.

According to Rogin, Spencer Oliver "also objected to taking important diplomatic functions away from the OSCE's formal structures and giving them to an NGO."

Says Oliver:

"It looks like they're outsourcing a major diplomatic function of the OSCE chairmanship, which would be a very bad precedent to set."

Hmm. Well, I'm sorry, but I think NGOs do have a role to play in convening diplomats outside of dipolomatic structures that fail as much as the OSCE's fail. Here's a body that couldn't get 52 unarmed police mentors landed in Osh during the pogroms -- the UN can often do at least that much.

I think in fact it's a very, very good idea to have meetings outside of diplomatic structures, with those diplomats, off the record, to try to get them to overcome some of their obstacles to action, and also to have conversations outside the artificial bubble of false reporting that inevitably creeps into the OSCE information stream -- because heads of mission aren't always the most stellar; because they are trying to keep their missions and not lose them; because they aren't even mandated to even meet with human rights activists who might tell them what's really going on (in Uzbekistan, for example).

However -- I definitely opposed the idea of the chair-in-office creating a permanent NGO advisory body because I don't think NGOs should have instituted relationships in this fashion that will inevitably privilege the NGOs and GONGOs with a softer touch that states would like to snuggle with and provide yet another technical means of blocking the more critical and vocal voices.

In that sense I share Oliver's concern about "outsourcing" to NGOs -- there is a lot of that in the world, and not always beneficial.

But that's exactly why I would welcome a credible NGO think-tank that sets up a kind of observatory and serious discussion group outside of OSCE, not formally related to it, to try to bring about some reforms in this body long resistant to reforms (in part due to deliberate sabotage by Russia and its allies, in part due to Western neglect and loss of will in the face of the concerted Russian barrage).

THE IPI'S CREDIBILITY

Now, if the body doing this discussing is funded by the U.S. State Department, does that make it less than credible? Does this make it unable to credibly respond to Putin's Munich speech?

I think the IPI stands on its own over the years as an independent body, and has presided over many a meeting where participants have been free to be critical of the U.S. at the UN and in the world in general. So I don't think that's a fair issue -- and it's really an abstract issue as there are no funders today likely to be willing to put substantial amounts of funding into OSCE-watching (as distinct from watching the individual state members).

Furthermore, the distinguished Vienna Advisory Council created by IPI recently has significant pro-Kremlin Russian presence -- so it's not like this job is being run by, oh, the Chechen-Russian Friendship Society.

Kemp was taken to task by Conservative Canadian Senator Consiglio Di Nino, for saying, in this paper that OSCE PA parachutes in and reads attention-grabbing statements that undercuts long-term monitoring. Was this a reference to Moldova's elections? This could also have referenced the old long-simmering OSCE PA/ODIHR wrangle, whereby those delegations with the CIS parliamentarians on them, not democratically elected, begin to pronounce on situations where the ODIHR has already decided to call as "flawed" -- and among their tools for doing this is not sending a full-fledged monitoring delegation at all from ODIHR.

I would differ from Kemp to say that *sometimes* OSCE PA has done that but other times its parachuting in and reading of *frank* statements has been a blessing. You really have to analyze it country by country.

What I would argue is not so much that OSCE PA's powers be limited in monitoring, but that there be some kind of mechanism to prevent the duality of OSCE having PA monitors that do go to countries anyway when ODIHR has not ruled to send delegations. Indeed, it was my call to make sure on Turkmenistan's "parliamentary" "elections" that OSCE PA and ODIHR get on the same page and not monitor that triggered Rep. Hastings critique of my statement at the Congressional hearing (even though in the end neither monitored the highly manipulated elections in Turkmenistan).

ODIHR has to advertise more forcefully what its various incremental read-outs are: sending limited long-term observation missions before the elections is not a blessing of an election at all, and duplicitious abusive governments have sometimes claimed that it is. A CIS member of OSCE PA who is going in his CIS capacity to make a friendly call about the fake elections of a fellow abusive government is not related to OSCE PA. And both OSCE PA and ODIHR should not be splitting on the issue of whether to monitor at all, as that undermines the force for ODIHR's apt calls.

In the end, the way this internal family dispute of OSCE that has fortunately spilled out into the press is going to be handled is by having the Lithuanian chair handle the grant (I'd like to hear more about that and learn if in fact that will kill off critical discussion), and Ambassador Ian Kelly, the U.S. ambassador to OSCE who has apparently strategically WikiLeaked himself to The Cable, has reassured Spencer Oliver that he will keep tabs on the project to make sure OSCE PA is included in the workshops.

OK, sounds good -- but again, have we just re-opened the prospect that non-democratic OSCE PA members who will serve as stalking horses for the Kremlin line are now going to be able to pack the meeting and prevent a critical assessment of the Astana summit -- just to keep everybody happy?

RUSSIA'S AGGRESSIVE BID TO REMAKE OSCE

Let's remember what this is all about, at the end of the day, after it finishes being about the impropriety of no-bid contracts, the expensive nature of diplomatic conferences, the vicissitudes of OSCE PA monitoring and its long-standing war with ODIHR, and so on: it's about Russia trying to remake the security architecture in Europe, without the human rights dimension.

Soon it will be the 90th anniversary of Sakharov's birth on May 21, 2011, and there will be a conference in Moscow that once again examines the principle of integrating security and human rights, to which Sakharov devoted his life's work. The human rights,  intellectual freedom and democracy components of security cannot be jettisoned in favour of the real-politik of a security dictated by either the Kremlin's imperium or the exigencies of the EU's worries about energy security or American concerns to keep NATO's supply route to the war in Afghanistan.  This is going to be very hard to keep affirming in the windstorm of war-funding and war-fighting but the $83,000 that that International Peace Institute wants to spend on this strikes me as a small -- and very inexpensive -- enough contribution to ensuring the West doesn't fail again.

 

 

 

The Belarusian KGB's Outrageous Lies

Oh, dear God. I see the Belarusian government isn't content to just publish lies and false innuendos in its state-controlled media like the aptly-named Sovetskaya Belorussiya, or let it spill over into the Kremlin-controlled Russian press, but now has published this false claim that I gave money to the Belarusian opposition on the official Belarusian government website.

So let's go over it again, shall we?

I have not given any $211,000 or any other amount to Charter 97 or any other opposition group for this election.

I don't have anywhere near anything like $211,000 as an individual.

I do not have access to any funds like that as a grant from any foundation or any other individual or government.

I do not work in any grant-giving capacity of any sort; I'm a freelance writer and translator.

The claim says I am an employee of "U.S. Helsinki Watch," which is the old name for the organization Human Rights Watch, where I worked...20 years ago (from 1980-1990), and haven't worked there since.

HRW isn't a grant-giving organization, and has no programs in Belarus.

So this entire claim is fictional -- and of course, libelous. You would think most normal people bothering to follow Belarus would understand that I couldn't possibly have given or gotten to give such an amount (or any amount) of funds to somehow launch a conspiracy around the recent presidential elections, but there are people who see this and think "hmm" -- and to that extent it may harm my reputation or even livlihood.

The fact is, if I *did* have such funds -- say, by winning the lottery -- I'd be happy to give them to Belarusian groups!

Because there's nothing illegal about such activities, and indeed it would be a legitimate and much-needed gift and good deed to help independent media in this country and independent civic groups.

Why is the regime putting out this fiction?!

I have no idea. As I said -- I didn't give any such grant and don't have it to give.

What is this false claim based on?

I have no idea. Perhaps the regime figures that someone who in fact does have no organizational affiliation, and hasn't been to Belarus in some time, is someone on whom it is easy to pin a fake claim of conspiracy -- it's not like the other organizations mentioned that have people to come forward and vouch for them.

But I'm at the top of the list! How could this be? What could this be about? I'm told by someone I ran into on the Internet named Denis Baranov, who claims to be "in the know" about such matters, that if a foreigner is mentioned so specifically by name, they must "have something on him".

Well, it's not up to me to sit and speculate about the various ways I *might* be guilty of such a thing. Again, it's in that realm of "proving you are not a camel".

If this were some sort of normal country (and it's not, or we wouldn't be having this conversation), I'd consider trying to get a lawyer, and get independently audited bank statements and letters attesting to my character and copies of all my emails and correspondence certified by some independent auditor...but that's absurd. We're not dealing with a normal government here -- it's fake.

No doubt some sort of concoction is being put together that will somehow be based on the fact that I have written about Charter 97 and other groups and corresponded with them and translated their materials.

The good news about all this is that if this is as good as they got -- the KGB doesn't have a case. If *this* is what they have as proof of some "conspiracy" to "take over the government" that is "funded from abroad" -- and I'm here to tell you how fake it is (and others could attest to this), then I guess they are having trouble coming up with evidence. If, out of a list of foreign conspirators, *I'm* at the top, then this is an awfully, awfully lame and pathetic case. I mean, we were told about German and Polish intrigues and millions of euros...how is it that somehow there isn't, oh, I dunno, Hans-Georg Wieck at the top of this list, instead of me?!

I've also noticed something else about this, that jumped out at me more in the shorter version the Russian RIA Novosti ran: all the threads of this financial "conspiracy" seem to have been in the hands of a man who is now dead: Oleg Bebenin.

Oleg was found dead in September in what was said to be a suicide. Friends and family do not believe it was a suicide. I don't either, having known Oleg for years and never found him to be depressive or irrational, and always found him to be cheerful and reliable.

So, neat trick, that, pin everything on a dead man who can't defend himself. Awfully, um, courageous of you, Lukashenka.

It occurred to me -- we have to be prepared for anything -- that the regime could be thinking up some really dirty story here, and claim that somehow the opposition fought over money, and that perhaps in fact Oleg was killed -- but by one of his own or by a rival group in the opposition. I'll say that seems highly unlikely to me. For one, the groups were all pretty cooperative, surprisingly. For two, the people left willing to enter presidential races are a very hardened and seasoned bunch that have been through every kind of harassment (and are going through it again, now) and have been under a spotlight and a microscope as to their character and deeds for many difficult years. So I don't buy such a version.

It also occurred to me that a KGB-set up, or even some opposition figure's caper, could be involved, whereby this "$211,000" (such a precise number!) could have been claimed to have come from me, as a cover story, but really came from somewhere else. Moscow gold! Berlin gold! Um...Caracus gold?

Apparently some of the claims made in these articles are false, and some are true (and that's often how the KGB has worked, making a mixture of both to try to make it more plausible).

So some of the groups or agencies listed did give grants to Belarus -- and have been interviewed by Voice of America acknowledging this fact. In fact, I was contacted for that very VOA story but happened to be traveling and didn't get back to the reporter in time to get into the story.

The gist of the responses by those like NED or IRI who said they did give grants to Belarus was that they gave money for legitimate purposes that had to do with education and publications, and that this was not somehow a plot to overthrow the government.

BTW, isn't it time to ask, that if this incumbent really had locked in 80 percent of the population's support, and was so beloved, why does he need to cook up this huge conspiracy case and fret and fume about plots everywhere against him? He would laugh them off and ignore them if he really had this support. Guess he doesn't.

Each time this debate is had, on Twitter or forums or the comments sections on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty articles, some regime tool comes along like the fake "NJ Smith" who claims that there's this awful thing being done, illegally helping another country's opposition in elections. "NJ Smith" of course is a play on "Congressman Smith of New Jersey" who in fact has been very supportive of Belarus and helped sponsor Belarusian democracy in the past; hence the KGB propaganda pattern to try to discredit the representative by planting another meme around the words "NJ" and "Smith".

So let's reiterate it again: there is nothing wrong with helping elections abroad. This is considered normal, natural, and needed development work. For example, millions were provided by UNDP to assist the referendum in Kyrgyzstan. Not even the lurid tendentious press has come forward to claim that somehow these UN millions were a "conspiracy". Various government and NGO operations provided assistance in the recent Sudanese referendum. Democracy promotions and election training, activities, education, publications -- these are all perfectly fine. In developing countries, and countries with dysfunctional communists pasts like Belarus, it's understood that you need to help level the playing field by providing support to civil society. This isn't a crime. It's not against U.S. or European law. European political parties have even more latitude in how they help other fellow parties abroad. It's only in the overheated and paranoid imaginations of the Belarusian police state that these normal activities can be converted to something "evil".

We've heard in great detail how people bought tents, that they planned to put up on the square, just as they did in Kiev, during the Orange Revolution. So what? I wouldn't want people to freeze. When there are grave injusticies, people sometimes have to hold long demonstrations. I see no evidence that there was any violence planned or used in these demonstrations -- except by the police and riot troops and KGB. They were the ones doing the storming.

It's especially absurd now that Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other countries are now in flames with revolutions, largely assisted by the Qatar-funded television company Al Jazeera, to fuss about some NED grant for Belarus. I *do* find it interesting that many Western government leaders and commentators and leftist activists have an awful lot of time for revolutions where people demonstratively threw rocks and burned cars, and where Islamists may be waiting in the wings to try to take over to install even more oppressive regimes that would threaten secular society, yet they were fretting about alleged violence in Belarus, where a door was broken down by a police provocateur, and where the most extreme of the political parties might...make Belarusian the dominant language or...nationalize a factory. Honestly, the global double standard on these things has been breath-taking.

So far, with the US and EU threatening sanctions, and possibly greater punishments than they have in the past, the Belarusian authorities have begun doling out one political prisoner at a time -- they have at least 37 waiting trial on serious charges, and have rounded up many hundreds more who served or will serve short-term sentences or suffer job loss or expulsion from university.

Those who are the made trading partners of Belarus -- Germany, Russia, Poland and some others -- need to keep their eye on the ball here, and insist that all of these prisoners are let go and the charges dropped -- and of course, a long list of other basic human rights that are not likely to be forthcoming until indeed Lukashenka gets gone. Russia in particular is in a position to send a clear message -- not that the Kremlin is hardly a human rights peg to hang your hat on. Even so, it has leverage and can use it for good and should become responsible and feel some shame for propping up this dictator just like the U.S. can feel shame for propping up Mubarak.

And the same goes for Germany and Poland and others that actually go business with Minsk -- and feel they have to do business for the sake of energy security.

I continue to maintain that since these two countries in particular were willing to create an aid package of 3.9 billion euro if Lukashenka held fair elections, that they have to be willing to spend this kind of money to help the opposition and ordinary people now that clearly he hasn't done that. That was the piece that wasn't made clear, and that's why now Lukashenka can concoct stories about plots and putsches organized from abroad. I hope these and other neighboring countries are doing everything possible to help such groups as remain, and to take in refugees and provide others with educational and job opportunities abroad.

Ultimately, this outrageous lie and all the others the regime is telling are a sign of weakness, not strength. And they should serve as a cue to everyone to step up the pressure, not lessen it, and certainly not dither about whether "colour revolutions" are legitimate or whether it is somehow "wrong" to show solidarity with democrats abroad and help them. Shouldn't the events in Cairo and elsewhere in the world now tell us this, more than anything?

 

Refuting a Bold and Brazen Lie from the Belarusian KGB

I was surprised today to have several people send me a link to an article in the Belarusian state-controlled media claiming that I am bankrolling the Belarusian opposition to the tune of $211,000 (!).

Wow! I wish!

This online newspaper is still very aptly titled Sovetskaya Belarus. I'll say!

Unfortunately for the opposition, I haven't given any such grant or indeed any grant at all to Charter 97, as the article claims, or any other groups or persons. I simply don't have anything remotely like that kind of money, nor am I in any position to give out grants (too bad!).

The article also says that I'm from "American Helsinki Watch" -- which is the name of the organization I worked at from 1980-1990 -- now known as Human Rights Watch, an organization that isn't a grant-giving body, either, and isn't involved within Belarus.

It's truly bizarre, such a precise number like that -- $211,000 -- that I wonder where they could have gotten it.

I sure didn't give any grant like that, and frankly, I doubt that anyone did -- Charter 97 and other groups in Belarus, and the presidential campaigns, had only very modest support. Indeed, if they had the 3.9 billion euro promised by the Polish and German foreign ministers to Lukashenka if he held fair elections -- and had it well before these so-called "fair elections" -- we might not be having this conversation right now, while our friends like Andrei Sannikov are sitting in the KGB prison.

About 13 years ago, when Charter 97 first was formed, I was head of the International League for Human Rights (where I worked from 1997-2002).  I recall that we invited Charter 97 to become an affiliate, like dozens of other affliates around the world. This absolutely infuriated the government of Belarus, and they even dispatched a diplomat from their UN mission to show up at our office at the time to threaten us with a legal complaint to the New York State attorney general (!) to get our non-profit status revoked because we were now operating as a "foreign lobby" without declaration.

That's how they viewed innocent, legal, *rightful* activity that involved documenting and publicizing human rights violations in collaboration with a local NGO. They thought they could deal with us in the United States the way they deal with people in their own country -- with brute intimidation and force. We ignored them. You are allowed to have foreign affiliates.  All good.

At that time I believe we had funds of something like $25,000 specifically for this project which was used for computers and going to UN and OSCE meetings to make the case for human rights in Belarus. But that was a long time ago, and I don't think that's where this current concoction comes from at all -- it doesn't make sense.

I've never in my life had any grant of this size of "$211,000" myself, let alone had it somehow to give to anyone else. For years, I have worked as a freelancer with a modest income that is a fraction of this amount.

As I look at the list of other "financiers," I have no idea if any of those claims are true, but I couldn't help thinking this: and what if they are?!

All of them are perfectly fine organizations -- Frontline, which defends human rights defenders, the Norwegian Helsinki Group and so on. If they had 6,000 euros or $98,000 to give to a good group like Charter 97 in Belarus -- what of it? That's a perfectly legal thing to do -- at least in the free world, in a normal country.  The work that Charter 97 and other groups in Belarus do is open and transparent -- you can see for yourself by opening up their website what they do. Funding their website and publications and meetings would be a *good* thing, if you could. I wish indeed I did have a quarter of a million dollars to give to this worthy cause -- but I don't, and never had, and never gave anybody a dime to help them in this last election -- more's the pity.

And those who could have afforded it didn't either -- that's the real tragedy.

The article goes on to provide even more speculative information, making claims about the U.S. government-funded foundations National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute, both organizations that do give grants for training and education during elections -- and do so lawfully and legally, despite the sinister spin the Belarusian government is trying to place on it. Here the KGB (I'm not going to pretend this is a "journalist") recites a conversation they unabashedly describe as having been obtained from Skype -- so much for the common belief that Skype calls or instant-messaging can't be hacked by the KGB -- if it is true. Yet as with other claims in the piece, there is a lot of vagueness and insinuation that are not likely backed by reality. Two million dollars for the Belarusian opposition?! In your dreams.

As for the fact that Sannikov, coordinator of Charter 97, and others mentioned ran in the absurdly unfair presidential elections with 9 other candidates, there isn't anything immoral or wrong about helping their groups or web sites while they are engaging in such a civic activity, either. We all get that such a presidential "election" is more like an opportunity for organizing a social movement, not some authentic means of achieving power. Surely the results --jailing and beating for most of the candidates! -- should illustrate that, if other factors like the mere three months to prepare and lack of normal access to broadcasting don't.

I hope if those other foreigners *did* give these grants (and the stories about them could be as made up as the one about me), they don't feel ashamed or somehow spooked by this curious revelation, which, if true, could only come from the KGB reading people's e-mails or bugging their phone conversations or digging in their bank accounts, which is the real illegal and immoral activity here.

This bald-faced and big lie about me is especially pernicious because when somebody's actual name is used, and a precise figure, and even the name of something that sounds like an authentic organization, many people believe it -- and it's very hard to undo.

Last Word: How They Tried to Overthrow Big Daddy

This is my rough summary translation of a gripping live debate show in Russia on NTV called "Last Word" hosted by Pavel Selin. It's a popular show, and it shows that not everything about Russian TV is completely crushed by the Kremlin. (I realize it may all be contrived or allowed by the political leadership for the wrong motivations, but even so, some of the honesty comes through.)

Russian TV was very active in the campaign period showing the Belarusian opposition, and even running a multi-part series called "The Godfather" which was very critical of Lukashenka. ("Bat'ka" is the term people use to describe Lukashenka, it means literally "father" or "head" but since it's slang and often perjorative I will use the term "big daddy").

The show is one of those exhausting Russian crossfire debate shows unlike anything on European or even American television -- people not only drown each other out, they have knock-down shouting matches waving their hands and throwing fits. You might call this "Family Feud" and shut it off, as it at first seems very crazy, but in fact, it contains some very, very interesting stuff that helps you understand a lot not only about Belarus, but Russia, there are some very fine moments, it is a very emotionally gripping show, so watch it if you speak Russian. I don't think it would be easy to make a transcript, there is so much cross-talk and shouting and slang, but anyone who has the time might try.

Some highlights:

o The audience clapping for some people and not others is one of the oddities of the show (for the foreigner). Why do some pro-Belarusian government statements get applause? Why do some anti-government statements get wild clapping? Is it because these are different people in the audience? Or do they clap because they merely feel a good argument is made? or are they that easily swayed? They clap for Prokhanov, an odious right-wing figure known for his xenophobic and nationalist outbursts; but they clap for Khalezin, a Belarusian theater director who tells Russians they support this dictator only because it's economically profitable for them (so perhaps the audience claps because it feels no shame?)

o Lukashenka's representative seems right out of central casting. Aptly named Zimovsky (from "zima," or "winter") he has the white hair and ominscient smirk of Julian Assange. He is beamed in with perfect state-of-the-art fidelity to the audience in Moscow as if he is there -- Lukashenka declined to show, and as somebody in the group quipped, he won't appear on NTV until he is forced into exile in Moscow.  He turns in a completely chilling performance, smiling like a villain when asked what he thought of Irina Khalip, a journalist, being dragged from a car and beaten, screaming on the phone and trying to report the scene until police seize the phone, and saying it was "good" because "at last a journalist was speaking about what she actually sees". He uses the term "journalism's cannon fodder" to describe the reporters who came to the square during the demonstration and got beaten.

o the video clips of the demonstrations are moving; there is Rymashevski, a candidate with his head bound from having been beaten by riot police, calling on the demonstrators not to give into a provocation, to behave peacefully; there is an old man crying to the riot police, "Don't beat your sons and grandsons!" (or "Don't fear your sons and grandsons! -- I can't quite hear). There is the scenes of the vandals breaking the windows -- and statements that they are provocateurs.

o Matvei Ganapolsky, a Russian journalist, asks the question that really any liberal should be asking, regardless of whether they are a RealPolit sort of politician, or a cynical journalist who believes the Belarusian opposition is "paid for" and "disunited". He says that in fact, Lukashenka likely actually won. That even with fraud, the gap in numbers is too big. That he probably really does have that support. So given that he really had this victory, why the beatings? Why have riot police doing things like pulling the journalist Khalip out of the car? Why pushing Russian journalists face down in the snow? If it's such a victory, why do this?

o Leonid Margolin follows suit:  Real victors don't need to take hostages, that's a sign of weakness.

o Natalya Kolyada is really the star of the show. While the Russian male liberals, as well as they speak, aren't very strong in standing up to their own rightwing blowhards like Prokhanov and Mitrofonov (whose dyed black artifical pompadour is one of the fascinations of the show, a kind of counterpoint to Zimovsky's dreadful shock of white), and while some of the Belarusians seem to be somewhat intimidated on this show by all the shouting, Kolyada stands right up, interrupting when there is such bad faith in the speaker that it must be interrupted, and making very strong statements. The representative of the Union state (apparently the infamous Pal Palych Borodin is still heading it) is disgraceful -- he implies that there's something cowardly about Khalezin remaining on the square when his wife was carted off to jail -- Khalezin also makes some of the most dramatic lines in the show -- when Zimovsky starts describing Lukashevsky as a "bogatyr" (a legendary hero of the Russian folk tales), Khalezin says, "Hey, give me 10,000 riot police and I'll show you what a hero is, and you'll be left spinning". Prokhanov retorts something that sounds like "Hey, I'll give you $10,000, which is what you people take," -- somebody might help decipher that part but that's the gist.

Here's my summary, put any corrections in the comments.

Bel 'R Us: What to REALLY Do About the Last Dictatorship in Europe

   Presidential candidate  Andrei Sannikov, his wife, journalist Irina Khalip and their son going to vote on election day.

Bel 'R Us. All of us should feel ownership for the situation now in Belarus -- it is our own situation in the world -- divided, weak, cowardly, pragmatic -- beaten.

There is a simple thing Europe can do -- take the 3.9 billion euro promised by Poland and Germany to Lukashenka if he held free and fair elections, and demonstratively give it to the opposition and civil society groups in Belarus -- and get other countries and multi-lateral institutions to join the effort to end tyranny.

While interestingly, 3.9 billion euro were available for Lukashenka to "reform" after a few gestures, getting that coffer turned around to really defeat him and restore parliamentary democracy will be far more politically difficult. This opinion piece signed by the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany, Czech Republic and Sweden says there won't be "business as usual" with Lukashenka -- but talks vaguely of "deepening our engagement" with democrats without specifying they will directly aid them.

Democracy in Belarus keeps failing not because of Belarusian democrats, who are more clever and more braver than any of us in resisting the tyrannical Lukashenka regime -- and more remote but still deadly -- Kremlin oppression.

Democracy fails not because the Belarusian opposition isn't united -- Europe isn't united, either, about what to do about Russia and its client regimes, and shouldn't hold people who face jail for their views to a higher standard.                                                Sannikov, beaten by police and injured.

Democracy fails because human rights standards, promoters, and protective institutions are helpful, but not sufficient to fight dictatorships peacefully -- political strategies and political programs of aid and trade and sanctions and removal of legitimacy are needed.

Democracy fails because of a lack of attention and will, but also even a willingness to openly debate the received wisdom of scholarship and think-tanks and NGO white papers and media outlets on what works for Belarus.

Democracy fails because good states of the West are weak and terribly undermined by non-state actors, as the WikiLeaks saga as well as many acts of terrorism illustrate, and also by a growing determination of a nihilistic and self-preoccupied global movement of wired elites and hackers who want rule by coder-controlled wiki rather than governments elected by representative democracy.

Democracy fails because the story, while amply told in all the glories of both old and new media, can't get a hearing and an appropriate response -- the New York Times' first article on the events made an all-too-telling mistake of writing "Minsk, Russia" for the dateline and a  Huffington Post contributor was tweeting that the Belarusian opposition should get Tor circumvention software translated into Russian until it was gently explained to him that the people who already had it were arrested and their replacements unable to work in offices with the electricity turned off or the computers seized.

Democracy fails for all these reasons and many more, but it's worth getting the analysis right and challenging the recipes used to address Belarus one more time.

By now everyone should have the story of the grim events in Belarus -- after severely flawed elections, 30,000-40,000 demonstrators converged on a main square in Minsk to protest; their gathering, while attracting many thousands more supporters than even the opposition had anticipated, was peaceful, and yet the Belarusian government unleashed the OMON (riot troops) and KGB (as the secret police is still named), creating a deliberate provocation of a "storming" of the Government Building; beating and injuring hundreds, and detaining 7 out of the 9 independent presidential candidates; many of their campaign managers; the entire staff and volunteers of Charter97.org, the most widely-known independent news site; even the acting troupe of the Belarus Free Theater who weren't on the square were rounded up.

The spectacle was decidedly Soviet in style: soon two of the presidential candidates were demonstratively meeting with the dictator Lukashenka on state television and recanting their views; among the most inspiring -- then demoralizing -- scenes of the day was the video of the policeman who called on his fellow men in uniform not to beat demonstrators (Khloptsy! Ne bey!) was himself arrested, and then, too, forced to recant on videotape.

For me, it was first thrilling to see my long-time colleague Andrei Sannikov, former deputy foreign minister and coordinator of Charter97.org, a leading presidential candidate, go hand-in-hand with his wife and young son to cast his ballot "against the dictator and for a free Belarus".  Like others long accustomed to watching the sacrifices of the Belarusian democratic opposition, I expected he and the others would lose in the first round of the rigged elections but force a second round; what I didn't expect, even from this known brutal regime, that Sannikov would be lying in the snow at the night's end, wincing in pain, and being carted off to KGB prison to face very serious charges and 5-15 years in jail for of supposedly inciting public disorder -- it sickens me beyond words.

I might have imagined any of the opposition leaders might win in a second round, where there might be less of them, and where the 3.9 billion euro may have induced Lukashenka to share power. But as one candidate, Nikolai Statkievich of the social democrats aptly quipped, "Dictators don't do second rounds."

Charter97.org now has an English translation of the excellent narrative of events and numerous independently-made videos and photographs that explain the story of how people peacefully protested, and provocateurs staged a "storming" to be able to set up the opposition candidates and their supporters on charges of violence. From these and many other videos on Youtube and LiveJournal, you can see how a relatively docile and passive crowd (it is, after all, long-suffering Belarus) is standing outside the Government House with signs, flags, and flowers. Several beefy men come up then in the space between where the crowd has stopped and the doorway, and begin methodically breaking the windows and doors, their hands wrapped in preparation and their implements ready.

Then one is showing talking into his sleeve, and eyewitnesses report that he was talking into a hidden microphone. Independent observers agree that these vandals were not part of the opposition groups, but provocateurs, who then summoned the riot police who came with their shields and their truncheons.

This narrative, given all this huge amount of documentation, shouldn't have to be disputed. But it is, and not only by Lukashenka and his odious Interior Minister Kuleshov, who spins a propagandistic tale for the masses of an enraged crowd going on a rampage. While his claims of 30 injured police certainly merit investigation (there might be some, but we haven't independently confirmed the story), his comparison of these events -- get this! -- to the Battle of Kulikovo between Muscovy and Tatars (!) lets us know we are dealing with entrenched, fanatical dictatorship. The notion of the "opposition storming" became part of the BBC narrative immediately -- it will be hard to undo -- even with the footage of the injured opposition candidates and supporters, who appeared to have been the ones in fact stormed -- by police.

While our immediate problem is the brutality of the Lukashenka regime, there are at least eight deeper reasons why we have this "Nightmare Before Christmas," as the Committee to Protect Journalists has dubbed it; these reasons have been a long time in making and are fiercely disputed: