OSCE Unbound

"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....