"Toronto Star" удивила неожиданной статьёй о Беларуси
Back to Belarus: ‘The North Korea of Europe’
Belarus: ‘The North Korea of Europe’
January 07, 2012
Rick Westhead
Belarussian plainclothes police officers detain an opposition activist during a protest to demand the freeing of political prisoners in Minsk Oct. 25, 2011.
Julia Darashkevich/REUTERS
MINSK, BELARUS-Victor Pliuto’s family and friends figure the 20-year-old factory worker either has a death wish or is moonlighting as an American spy.
It’s how they make sense of his reckless public comments about President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s only dictator and a man who has a stranglehold on power in Belarus.
On a recent blustery morning in Minsk, Pliuto sat on a park bench only a few feet from the headquarters of the KGB, as this country’s secret police are still known, and explained how Lukashenko has hobbled Belarus.
“This country is a place that kills initiative and forbids personal expression,” said Pliuto, steely eyed with dark blond hair. “The world needs to know there is a police state in the middle of Europe and that countries in the European Union like Germany and Holland do business with them.”
It’s dangerous talk in a place some describe as “the North Korea of Europe.”
Passersby who heard Pliuto did a double take as they walked through the park. He made no effort to avoid being overheard. After spending seven days in jail earlier this year following a public protest, he said, “I’m done with being afraid.”
Belarus is a modern-day Soviet Union, complete with the paranoia and fear the former Cold War power bred. Many of its 9.5 million citizens are shell-shocked, suffocating in a country dragged down under the weight of runaway inflation and a government that repeatedly rewrites its laws to give Lukashenko and his allies more power.
The Internet is heavily censored and locals warn many mobile phones and most hotel rooms are bugged.
Those few Belarusians who are brave enough to whisper about their heavy-handed government do so looking nervously to nearby doorways, expecting the KGB to burst in at any moment.
“Just the other day, a Russian journalist was talking to me and sitting in the very seat you are in,” said Irina Khalip, the wife of jailed opposition leader Andre Sannikov. “The KGB came in and took him away after five minutes.”
Lukashenko was born in Kopys, Belarus, and raised by his unmarried, single mother. After two years in the Soviet army, he was appointed director of a state-run farm in 1987.
In 1994, the then-39-year-old ran for president on a platform of stamping out corruption in the former Soviet republic. Described by local press as “the angry young man,” Lukashenko accused 70 top government officials of skimming public money. He pledged to lower food prices, ban private land ownership and boost employment by ordering struggling factories to resume production.
In a second-round of balloting, Lukashenko won in a landslide, securing more than 80 per cent of votes. Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich received just 14 per cent.
“I promise you there will be no dictatorship,” Lukashenko said at the time.
Lukashenko was always careful to craft his image. The day he was elected in 1994, he arrived at a TV studio in a Mercedes but saw an old Russian-made Lada. The cameramen shot him getting out of that car instead.
Filmmaker Yuri Khaschevatsky says Western powers have had ample warning about Lukashenko’s cunning and his grasp on reality. In 1998, Khaschevatsky was invited to Germany to meet with then-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
“I told Schroeder a story about Lukashenko,” Khaschevatsky, 65, recalled. “He was touring Tomsk, Russia, and speaking to World War II veterans. He had a shaking voice and tears on his face, his hand over his heart, and he told them he understood their pain because his father had died in the war. The problem was that the war ended in 1945 and Lukashenko was born in 1954.
“I guess his mother was pregnant for nine years,” Khaschevatsky said with a laugh. “We’re talking about a person whose own illusions have become his reality. He’s created an unreal world to craft his image.”
In the 17 years since his first electoral victory, Lukashenko has turned his back on that first solemn vow as president, steadily tightening his grip on power and dismissing the repeated concerns of human-rights organizations.
In 1996, a year after he praised security officials for shooting down a stray hot-air balloon, killing two Americans on board, Lukashenko rewrote Belarus’s constitution to give himself nearly unlimited powers. He extended his own term limit, gave himself lifelong immunity from prosecution and the authority to declare a state of emergency at will. He also secured control of political positions from judgeships to parliamentary seats.
Lukashenko made it a crime for anyone to defame or simply “insult” the president and he closed the main opposition newspaper, Svaboda.
Over the following decade, some of Lukashenko’s main political adversaries simply disappeared and dissent began to percolate.
In December 2010, Belarusians returned to the polls. Independent observers said Lukashenko committed widespread electoral fraud to secure his re-election. While he claimed he’d won 79.7 per cent of the votes, observers insisted his support was closer to 40 per cent.
The results triggered a wave of antigovernment protests and at least 700 arrests in Minsk.
Many of those who protested have since been fired from their jobs at universities and other public-sector departments, local activists say. Lawyers representing jailed opposition leaders have been disbarred.
Some of those arrested face as many as 15 years in prison.
Laws have been passed in recent months that stiffen the penalties for protesters and police have been given the power to take into custody anyone who gathers in a public place.
The new laws give KGB agents immunity from prosecution in cases where they use force against citizens, and recent cases suggest they’re relishing their new freedoms.
Ukrainian activist Inna Shevchenko recently discovered how much power police now enjoy in Belarus.
On Dec. 19, a year after Lukashenko’s controversial re-election, Shevchenko was among three women who stood topless outside KGB headquarters, wearing fake moustaches to lampoon Lukashenko, and protested the presidency.
The three were arrested, as expected, and released within a few hours. But instead of returning to Ukraine, they disappeared. Shevchenko told the London Independent newspaper that they were bundled into a minivan with the windows blacked out, driven around for hours, and finally taken to Yelsk, a remote wooded region close to the Ukraine border.
Six or seven masked men had blindfolded the women and tied their hands.
Shevchenko was asked if she liked breathing and she nodded yes.
“Good, enjoy it while you can because you are about to breathe your final breath,” she was told.
While they were later released, the men held knives to the women, cut their hair and stripped them.
Lukashenko has hardly shied away from criticism of his tactics. He’s accused protesters and political opponents alike of being bandits, saboteurs, drug addicts and terrorists. “That’s it,” he said following last year’s election. “I warned you that if some commotion started, we’d have enough forces. Folks, you tangled with the wrong guy. I’m not going to hide in the basement. So let’s be done with it. There will be no more hare-brained democracy.”
For months after the December 2010 election, Belarusians found ways to voice their dissent within the boundaries of the country’s ever-restrictive laws. Some gathered for protests arranged over Facebook and held up candles and photos of those missing or imprisoned. In May, motorists staged a demonstration in Minsk by driving slowly with their hazard lights on, causing enormous traffic jams.
In July, thousands gathered outside Minsk’s main railway station, standing in rows that stretched across the sidewalk. Various sections of the crowd clapped in unison, amusing spectators and befuddling police.
“It was almost comic,” says a local journalist. “The police would run to one section of the crowd that was clapping and as soon as they got there, the clapping would stop there and start in another section of the crowd.”
Police made it known that anyone clapping in public would be jailed. Minsk police chief Igor Yevseyev highlighted the absurdity of the threat when he announced at a news conference that people applauding soldiers and veterans would not be accosted.
Pliuto arrived at the protest with his 14-year-old brother Sergei and scoured the crowd for their mother Tatiana. But baton-wielding police began bundling protesters into vans and Pliuto cursed, asking a local police officer where his mother might be. He was jailed.
“There were no blankets, no mattresses, we slept on wooden boards,” Pliuto says. “The food was what you give to pigs. And when the prisoners in cells above us went to the bathroom, it came through the pipes and covered us.”
Before last December’s presidential elections, perhaps sensing his electorate was ready for a change, Lukashenko - who bragged Belarus had become “an island of peace and stability” - sought an edge by promising to increase the salaries of all civil servants to about $500 a month from $350. The move triggered a collapse in the value of Belarus’s ruble. Months after the election, the government was forced to devalue the currency by 40 per cent.
The prices of pork and fish have since tripled, said journalist Aleksandr Yanussik.
On a chilly morning in mid-December, a long line of sober-faced retirees snaked along a downtown Minsk street. Milk costs about 46 cents per litre, but locals had heard that some subsidized milk was available for 32 cents. The crowd had been lining up for half a day on the chance the rumour was true.
A window in a local bank tells the tale of Belarus’s financial collapse: as people scramble to convert their rubles into stable U.S. dollars, fixed-term deposits offer up to 64 per cent interest.
As government foreign reserves have slipped, critics say Belarus’s trading partners in Europe - Russia is Belarus’s largest trading partner, followed by Germany and Holland - could have pressured Lukashenko to improve his country’s human-rights record.
“These countries like Germany in the EU made statements but they were ignored,” Khalip said. “It’s a great example of realpolitik. These countries are pragmatic. They know Belarus is a totalitarian country but the trade is huge. They can buy cheap gasoline and petrochemicals from Belarus and make money from Belarusian products (the country is a major potash producer) shipped through European ports.”
The EU, like the U.S., has little influence here because Russia has signalled its willingness to help Lukashenko address his country’s financial crisis.
Lukashenko recently asked Russia for about $6 billion to build a new nuclear power plant. A few weeks ago, Russia instead offered up a loan of $10 billion at an interest rate of 5 per cent, Yanussik said.
“Russia has a lot at stake here,” Yanussik said. “It’s got radar here to monitor European airspace, communications facilities for the submarines in the Northern Atlantic, and it uses Belarus’s pipeline to get oil and gas to Europe.”
Natalia Kolyada, a Belarusian political dissident living in London, said many Belarusians are frustrated the international community often overlooks Lukashenko’s human-rights abuses. She says his government is little more than a shady arms dealer.
“Come on,” she said. “This is a country that sells arms to Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya and the Ivory Coast. Is this a government the West wants to support?”
There is hope for Belarus in its vocal and determined young activists.
Authorities rush to cover up the painted graffiti that appears regularly on Minsk buildings. Near the city’s biggest fruit and vegetable market, for instance, someone had spray-painted “Shtob on Sdzokh, on ubil?” a popular slogan of critical bloggers. The phrase translates loosely to “We want him dead, did he kill (his opponents)?”
“It’s a dangerous thing,” Yanussik said. “You get caught with a can of spray paint in the streets you can go to jail for years.”
Others take a less aggressive approach.
Sveta Sugako is the 26-year-old assistant director of the Belarus Free Theatre, a group that stages regular performances in Minsk. Its work typically has a controversial political message and many of the performers have been fired from other acting jobs because of their ties to the free theatre.
Its current production, “Tone of Silence,” highlights damning national statistics: at least 72 per cent of Belarusians can’t define democracy; in 2010, 75,400 women were registered as unemployed; Belarus continues to rank among the world’s worst when it comes to a free press; in 2009, 13 modelling agencies, with the help of the federal cultural ministry, allegedly sold girls into sexual slavery.
Sugako said the group uses Facebook and other social media to advertise its free shows. As long as they don’t charge money, Sugako says the government can’t legally shut them down. Donations are accepted.
“You turn on the state TV here and the government says things are fine,” she said, sitting in the theatre’s cramped office on the outskirts of Minsk. “People just want straight talk. No more lying. We’re tired of being the North Korea of Europe.”