BELARUS: A CASE OF ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
By Gwynne Dyer, a London-based independent journalist
whose articles are published in 45 countries

AZG Armenian Daily
15/03/2006

The ten million citizens of Belarus don’t go to the polls until 19
March, but the outcome is already certain: Alexander Lukashenko will
win a third term as president. Most other governments in Europe,
which see him as the continent’s last dictator, will express their
dismay and claim that the election was unfair.

They will be right in the sense that the opposition has been
mercilessly harassed and that the counting of the votes probably
won’t meet international standards.

But they will be wrong if they really think that Lukashenko would
have lost a fair election.

“It is necessary…to take a stand against this post-Soviet autocrat
and his efforts to totally suppress what remains of independent
initiatives in Belarus,” said former Czech president Vaclav Havel
last year, but Lukashenko does not see autocracy as a bad thing. As
he told Belarusian radio early this month: “An authoritarian ruling
style is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it.

Why?…You need to control the country, and the main thing is not to
ruin people’s lives.”

Belarus has more policemen per capita than any other country in
the world, and a few of Lukashenko’s harshest critics have simply
“disappeared”. Opposition politicians are regularly beaten up or
imprisoned, and people can go to jail for up to two years simply for
openly criticising the president. It is an ugly, petty, oppressive
regime that is reminiscent in many ways of the old Communist tyrannies
— but Lukashenko has won two elections and a referendum in the past
dozen years, all with more than 70 percent of the vote.

He didn’t win them just by stuffing ballot boxes, and although
many people in Belarus feel intimidated by his rule, if they really
constituted an outraged majority then the tool for their liberation
is readily available. In the last five years, disciplined crowds of
non-violent protestors have overthrown similar “post-Soviet autocrats”
in several other post-Soviet states. If the problem is just unfree
elections and intimidation, why don’t Belarusians get rid of their
faintly Chaplinesque dictator that way?

The answer is to be found in the results of an international
opinion poll that was published last week by the Social Research
Institute (TARKI) in Budapest. The survey was conducted last year
in eleven central and eastern European countries that were ruled by
Communist tyrannies for at least a generation until the revolutions
of 1989-91. The only country where a majority of the people polled
preferred the “democratic” systems (some real, some sham) that they
have lived under since then was the Czech Republic, where 52 percent
actively supported democracy and only a small minority longed to have
Communism back.

In most of the former Soviet-bloc countries the nostalgia for Communist
rule was strong, peaking at 38 percent in Bulgaria and 36 percent in
Russia (where only 13 percent favoured democracy). But this is hardly
surprising when you consider that the most people’s experience, in
most of these countries, was that the end of Communist rule brought
a steep fall in living standards and a sharp rise in insecurity and
inequality. For Russia, it also brought the loss of a centuries-old
empire, the “exile” of tens of millions of Russians as minorities
in newly independent countries, and a huge decline in the country’s
power and influence in the world.

These things are not what normally accompanies democracy
elsewhere. They happened in central and eastern Europe partly because
the social and economic costs of converting from a centrally-planned
economy to a free market were bound to be very high, and partly because
the former Communist elite seized the opportunity to “privatise”
the state’s former assets (i.e. almost everything) into their own
pockets. It was an experience that has given democracy a very bad
name in the former Soviet bloc, and only time and the rise of a new
generation will erase these attitudes.

And here we have Belarus, where a former collective-farm manager who
was legitimately elected to power in 1994 halted the privatisation
process before it had properly got underway. Lukashenko has preserved
both the good and the bad elements of the Communist system almost
unchanged (except that the actual Communist Party no longer rules). So
there has not been the same crash in living standards in Belarus,
and there is none of the soaring inequality and unemployment seen in
almost all of its neighbours.

There are also no free media, and secret police everywhere, and
the drab conformity typical of late-period Communist states, and
occasional state violence against “dissidents”. But Lukashenko would
probably have won a majority of the votes honestly in every election
and referendum he has held.

Why has it happened this way in Belarus and not elsewhere? Partly pure
chance, but Belarus was also an ideal candidate because it has a very
weak national identity (most people there actually speak Russian).

There is little of the nationalism that helped most other former
Soviet countries to persevere with the changes, and many Belarusians
would be happy to be reunited with Russia. But even there they would
have to undergo many of the painful changes that they have avoided
by choosing to live in this time warp.

Sooner or later they will have to go through them anyway, but not
yet. Not in this election.