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:
1. Human rights work is necessary but not sufficient for Belarus. The human rights paradigm leads to moral equivalencies and ultimately inaction and rating of situations as less prioritized by major human rights groups and institutions. Political will, concerted political efforts by individual states and mulilateral institutions to aid democracy movements and disincentivize and punish dictators are also required.
2. Efforts to unite the Belarusian opposition are not only fruitless, they are misguided and should cease. Hello, Poland, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, and you, too, United States! Are you united about what to do about Russia -- and notice I've included Russia in that list, because it's not united either. Europeans who can't get their act together on what to do about energy dependence and oppression in Russia and Belarus shouldn't expect more of the beleaguered Belarusian opposition.
3. Both the Belarusian and Russian languages must be tolerated and encouraged to reach various audiences in Belarus. Aid planners and helpers especially in the immediate neighborhood can be very doctrinaire about this issue, and it hobbles progress. Yeah, I got the memo that "everybody understands Belarusian". But not everyone is comfortable speaking it, and that means opposition leaders and their supporters and ordinary people, and there needs to be recognition of this with aid and media programs.
4. While nationalism has been a route that brought unity and identity -- and victory -- to movements like Poland's Solidarity, it's not the only path to national salvation. Universality -- the joining of Belarus to Europe -- is another strain not only of opposition thinking but practice in Eastern Europe succession to the EU.
5. By the same token, nationalism in Belarus has not been notable for fascism or antisemitism, so Westerners should not fear and discourage nationalism in this European nation which has as much legitimacy as any nation.
6. Media assistance should cease to be sort that provides training or demands to "professionalize" and become competitive in a free market (it's absent in Belarus) and be consciously configured to be directly supportive of independent website and publications, whether human rights, news, or opposition.
7. Cynicism about "astro-turfing" or government and civic institutional support of opposition movements, based on the failures of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and based on the imperfection of Western democracies, should be discounted and dissuaded; a real movement of democrats who have existed without much help at all from the West have managed to turn out 40,000 to resist the last dictatorship in Europe -- and that has to be greatly respected and sustained. Western governments, whatever their human rights sins at home and abroad, are right to support Belarusian democrats and rather than discredit either the West or those Belarusians for this moral relationship, critics should extend rather than undermine this morality by crabbing about Western hypocrisy or claiming other situations are more deserving. This is the heart of Europe, as they keep telling you. The idea of Europe matters in the world.
8. Scholarship on Belarus has been poor, meager, tendentious, divisive, in part because it tends to be supported by nationalists in exile or the regime itself, in both explicit or cryptic fashion; pundit commentary is often superficial or RealPolitik-defeatist. Anna Applebaum's analysis of the Belarusian situation for the Washington Post (she is married to the Polish Foreign Minister) is typical of the implicit defeatism and quietism one finds in Washington on this issue, absent a perfect Belarusian nationalist formula suitable to Poland -- a position that matches symmetrically the defeatism of the Kremlin-sponsored Russia Today. This commentary turned in by the arch-cynic nationalist Jan Maksimiuk of RFE/RL's Belarus Service is typical as well of the problem.
There are only a few prominent writers on Belarus and we need many more, to diversity their received wisdom and challenge some of their unacceptable premises. David Marples, for example, a respected scholar who is often the only voice speaking in the West on Belarus when other intellectuals are preoccupied, consistently sides with the nationalists and disparages the universalists by knocking them as disunited, pro-Russian or worse. On openDemocracy, we see from Natalia Leshchenko a utopian and strange amalgam of controlled state nationalism with a feminine archetype and a reductivism of "Soviet" and "European" narratives that seem to tacitly accept suppression of authentic opposition as a recipe for change. At Carnegie, we see from Olga Shumylo-Tapiola a truly outrageous implication that the opposition should be 'in dialogue" with the people who just clubbed them over the head and threw them in jail, and that "radical elements" in the opposition who oppose Lukashenka and want to supposedly monopolize the dialogue with the EU are preventing Lukashenka from such a EU dialogue (?!). See what I mean?
9. The situation of Belarus must be raised with Russia and Russia should feel responsible for perpetuating it and should be part of changing it. This seemingly obvious point is sharply contested by thinkers in Polonia (Polish diaspora and Polish-Americans) in the U.S. and the old Capitive Nations' lobby in particular (even less than in Poland itself), who believe you should never raise Belarusian issues with the Kremlin, because that is some kind of tacit recognition of its hegemony. Yet Russia created this situation, and has to be part of its solution. The U.S. State Department and other foreign offices have overcome this nationalist-dictated reticence in the past and raised Belarus with the Kremlin; they must do so now.
No. 7 is a particular demoralizer.
When Timothy Snyder tried to take a brave stand on behalf of the American intelligentsia (such as it is) at the New York Review of Books, he was greeted by the usual ankle-biters in the comments who sneered that Americans have no right to raise human rights in places like Belarus due to their pursuit of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are too arrogant in prescribing solutions to other states. There is predictable commentary from the wired "progressive" left everywhere that the Belarusian opposition is concocted -- Evgeny Morozov, the supposed anti-cyberutopian, himself from Belarus yet not part of the opposition there, was particularly disgraceful with a snarky and apparently unfounded tweet claiming that #electby was a Twitter trending topic in Washington, DC: "This status update tells you quite a bit about the nature of 'Twitter' Revolutions 'electby is now trending in #DC.'"
Even Timothy Garton-Ash, who always shows up at these sorts of moments with some sort of metaphor (this time, to say that Belarus is "Europe's Burma"), feels called upon to pre-anticipate *his* snipers in the comments by saying that the British police wielding clubs against young university students protesting tuition hikes and forced into a "kettle" weren't defending a brutal, authoritarian regime. He calls Belarus -- in Europe -- "a far away country" -- and indeed it does feel far away to most British liberals more preoccupied with Israel and Palestine.
The OSCE rapporteur on the media Dunja Mijatovic has done her job and denounced the press crackdown promptly, but Kazakh Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev, still the chair-in-office of OSCE until the end of the year, has had nothing to say; the next in line to chair OSCE, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Audronius Azubalis doesn't seem to be visible (the president of Lithuania had the misfortune to talk about the liklihood of Lukashenka's victory for the sake of "stability" before the elections); and the OSCE office in Minsk website is still rhapsodizing about rural development and agricultural eco-tourism, ignoring the urban developments and tours of KGB cells going around all around it. This might be the time to pull this mission, unless somebody can show that it is useful in buying activists plane tickets.
Although this is a story of the suppression of the free media and free association, it's also one that has a thousand voices anyway. It is easy to become fractured and distracted with the plethora of new media tools, and all the many ways numerous people can tell their story endlessly, albeit to a largely indifferent world -- I've responded to some of the biased exultation I've seen in this regard and will have more to say about the absolute inadequacy of these tools for trying to do real things, especially in situations where the problem isn't that some geek didn't download and activate Tor.
The Internet does not necessarily save humankind; the Internet is what is being used now to draw up people's indictments, and movements that grew and thrived -- but then became dependent -- upon the new media devices are now experiencing the harsh realities of trying to carry on when the cell phones are shut off and the offices sealed. Media is good for telling a story -- but we will need more than Twitter to get the Belarusian democrats out of jail and into a free parliament.
First, there's that 3.9 billion euro that Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski and his German colleague Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle wielded as a carrot in meeting with Lukashenka before the election. They must now consciously, demonstratively and directly spend this on the Belarusian opposition. The political parties and institutes of European states, unlike the United States, are not hobbled by laws that prevent them from providing direct support to their party counterparts abroad, and this must be consciously used for support of the Belarusian opposition and all kinds of civil society groups; some of this is already happening, but is not enough.
The chief reason people vote for dictators is that their jobs and food come directly from the state and disloyalty is harshly punished with firing, expulsion from university or jail. A large Belarusian aid fund could change that dramatically.
Meanwhile, the U.S., where most aid for Belarus has come from a variety of agencies and party institutes that can only engage in paying themselves consulting fees to train others overseas need to reconfigure that self-serving package and look at those agencies that provide more direct assistantance, and work more explicitly on human rights and democracy rather than development.
All kinds of other efforts should be made to get as many moral statements made to create the "wall of shame" around Lukashenka -- using the old Amnesty International method of writing a postcard to the prisoners right now is one thing anyone can do:
Andrei Sannikov, Glavpochtamt, a/ya 8, SIZO KGB, Minsk 220050, Belarus
And if you need some "clicktivism," write your thoughts in 140 characters to the Belarusian Interior Ministry who precided over the beating and jailing of dissidents -- they're on Twitter, too, like everybody else -- or use the handy complaints form on Lukashenka's website or email the KGB at [email protected]
And here's where I need to speak about point Number 1, the moral limitations of human rights work, something that I will inevitably go on doing anyway.
Human rights groups have made the usual protests, illustrating best while the battle for Belarusian freedom -- which, unlike Kulikovo has been fought peacefully and should go on so -- human rights are necessary, but not sufficient to the problem of dictatorship.
Human Rights Watch elected to lead its statement of concern about the crackdown with a curious concession to this unlawful regime, unwielding unlawful power brutally:
"Belarusian authorities have a duty to ensure public order, but that duty needs to be carried out with respect for human rights and the rule of law," said Anna Sevortian, Russia office director for Human Rights Watch. "It cannot be a pretext for arbitrary arrests and punitive measures against the opposition."
And the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who often takes her cue from human rights NGOs, spoke in the same vein:
"While I condemn any calls for or resort to violence on the part of some radical factions in the opposition,” Pillay stressed, “I would like to note that the relevant authorities must fully respect and ensure their political opponents’ rights to peaceful demonstrations and freedom of speech.
“I am very much concerned by the use of force against demonstrators who were not participating in hostilities, violence against and abduction of opposition candidates and their supporters, detention of opposition activists and human rights defenders, and searches and harassment of independent non-governmental organizations,” the High Commissioner said.
Human Rights Watch may wish to be cautious about a situation they may not have investigated personally, but this sort of nod to state power isn't the standard fare for many other statements from HRW on the front page today, for example. And where did Pillay find any "resort to violence on the part of some radical factions in the opposition"? I'm not seeing it -- is this something from official verbal claims on state television, or documented?
Whatever the human rights mandate exigencies (and politicization of UN bodies that reflect bad-faith pressure from states), ultimately this sends the wrong message: the Belarusian state is legitimate; the opposition is not.
The joint U.S.-EU statement does better in how it places the emphasis:
The United States and the European Union reiterate their call for the immediate release of the presidential candidates and the over 600 demonstrators who have been taken into custody in the wake of the presidential elections in Belarus. We strongly condemn all violence, especially the disproportionate use of force against presidential candidates, political activists, representatives of civil society and journalists. Taken together, the elections and their aftermath represent an unfortunate step backwards in the development of democratic governance and respect for human rights in Belarus. The people of Belarus deserve better.
That's a very good example of how politics -- actions from governments -- and not just carefully-parsed human rights organizational statements differ -- the former concedes the implicit illegitimacy of the regime; the latter concedes the right to maintain public order even for authoritarian regimes, and oppositions are assumed to be willing to resort to violence to topple them just because they challenge the status quo. That these abstractions, whatever their universal value, aren't very helpful in both understanding -- and more importantly, acting upon -- the narrative in Belarus is a truth of the sort that can't get a hearing now, when the world is preoccupied with the scandal of WikiLeaks, and the potential chilling effect of a possible prosecution of the anarchist hacker Julius Assange, wanted on sex crime charges.
Why should parsing the largely ineffectual statements of various human rights groups matter? Because, again, fixing Belarus is primarily a moral, not legal or political or economic problem, that will be fixed when enough people can stand up and be consistently moral about it.
These are little things, in small places, sometimes. While Human Rights First, which is concerned about the "chilling effect" of the WikiLeaks drama caused by Amazon, a private company, exercising its judgement that its Terms of Service were violated by hosting stolen diplomatic cables, and even invoking a Belarusian activist in its argumentation, it hasn't yet commented on the crackdown actually going on now in Belarus.
Where actual rather than imagined suppression of Internet free speech can be seen more starkly is at VKontakte, the Russian Facebook-like social network, where Andrei Sannikov once had more than 8,000 friends who supported his independent campaign -- but now his group has been abruptly deleted by the management in Russia -- now that the Belarusian opposition has ceased to be useful to the Kremlin to bang on Lukashenka to get a better gas transit deal, and is now declared "unlawful" by a regime they prefer to do business with.
Index on Censorship, an old organization which has been around since the time when we had to smuggle out samizdat on thin sheets of onion-skin paper before the advent of fax machines and the Internet, has kept a focus on Belarus and done what is visible and important: publishing the news and holding a vigil with prominent playwright Tom Stoppard, who has supported the Free Theater.
All of this sort of publicizing and discussing and taking moral stands are all needed, and even if they seem futile, must be pursued in ever-widening circles; this is how the Soviet Union and the Latin American juntas and the African despots were defeated by democracy movements in the past. These methods don't seem to work as well for movements struggling under theocratic or maniacally kleptocratic regimes, but it's not like "constructive dialogue" works, either.
This has been a very long piece, with lots of contentious views that many people paid handsomely to keep the Belarusian dysfunction a chronic infection have a vested interest in opposing -- and not only in the Lukashenka regime.
I don't expect any consensus to develop around these disputed themes, but if each person feels that "Bel R Us" they can take whatever big or little step is within their power to get the opposition leaders out of jail and restore civil society.
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