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....
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