Belarus: 7 revolutions in 2 hours

To Minsk’s outrage and Moscow’s unhappiness, the US, EU, and UN are taking direct aim at Lukashenka’s regime, writes Alyaksandr Kudrytski 
in Transitions Online.

President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s annual address to the Belarusian parliament on 19 April was not one of his more dazzling speeches. As he admitted, “there will be no resonant ideas.” Instead, he said, “I will leave all grand and resonant ideas to the Third All-Belarusian Convention, which will be held at the beginning of next year.”

All-Belarusian Conventions, which bring together hand-picked representatives of different regions and strata of society, typically foreshadow major political campaigns by the regime. It will be no different in 2006, as Lukashenka will be running for a third term as president, a constitutional impossibility that became possible after a national referendum in October 2004. 

In his two-hour speech, Lukashenka replaced grand ideas with a summary of economic successes over the past five years of his 10-year rule and objectives for another five years. But he struck perhaps the keynote of his speech when he lashed out at his enemies. He was not so much attacking as fighting back. “We are not pawns on a chessboard. Even a large one,” he said in reference to a sharp increase in political pressure from abroad. “All these ‘color revolutions’ are not in fact revolutions at all. This is open gangsterism under the pretence of democracy.”

Lukashenka did not name his enemies, but the list is getting longer. The United States with its Belarus Democracy Act, which was adopted last year, has been a constant source of very public displeasure for Lukashenka. (How much practical pressure it has exerted, though, is unclear; details of the president’s bank assets have not yet been made public, as the writers of the act promised.) The UN and the European Union are rapidly catching up. In a report to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva prepared in March, Special Rapporteur Adrian Severin concluded that Belarus is rapidly approaching a state of dictatorship. 

The EU has gone even further. On 10 March, the European Parliament released a statement saying that the Belarusian regime should be denounced as dictatorial. European deputies called for the personal bank accounts of Lukashenka and other high-ranking Belarusian officials to be tracked down and frozen and for the EU to provide more effective support to Belarusian independent media and civil society. The head of the European Commission’s delegation to Belarus, Ambassador Ian Boag, announced that the EU will use new financial mechanisms in its TACIS program to support transitional societies involving projects which currently have to be coordinated with the Belarusian government, leaving Belarusian non-governmental organizations at the whim of the authorities. 

These moves are clearly upsetting Lukashenka. “There will be no money in Belarus that would help overthrow the current authorities,” the president declared in his speech. “None! Remember this. And let those who smuggle this money in bags, in suitcases, through embassies, hear this.” It was not a warning diplomats to Belarus could have missed: they had been invited to attend the president’s address to parliament. 

When Lukashenka spoke about bags of money, he meant it literally. On 17 April, just one day before the presidential address, the government-controlled First National TV aired shots of two people, reportedly Lithuanians who had been arrested smuggling $200,000 into Belarus from Lithuania. The supposed recipient was Siarhey Skrabets, a member of Respublika, the only opposition group in the former parliament. (There are none now.) Baltic News Service quoted an anonymous source in the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, who called the incident a setup aimed both at the Belarusian opposition and Lithuania. The source said neither of the men arrested were Lithuanians, nor were they arrested in a train from Vilnius, as Belarusian television claimed.

To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.