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...
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