BELARUS DIGEST

On this day 70 years ago, on March 5, 1940, the politburo of the Communist Party of the USSR has passed the decision to kill several thousands officers of the Polish army. The killings are now known as Katyn Massacre, named after the first known place of where the executions have taken place. The Katyn Massacre is a historical episode where the role of Belarus is usually understated or, better said, ignored at all. This has its reasons.

Among the officers of the Polish army killed in Katyn there were many people from West Belarus that was part of the Second Polish Republic before 1939. In particular, one of two generals killed by the Soviets was Bronisław Bohatyrewicz from Hrodna, who had also been a commander of Belarusian national self-defence units in 1918-1919. According to historians’ estimates, about a quarter of the 14.5 thousands people killed in Katyn were Belarusians.

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The council of the Polish city of Kraków has declared Aliaksandr Lukašenka, the President of Belarus, persona non grata in the city. It is a symbolic gesture of solidarity with the Union of Poles in Belarus.

The city council has passed a resolution which appeals to the European Parliament to take all possible effective action against the Belarusian state to protect the rights of persecuted Poles in Belarus.

The conflict around the Union of Poles of Belarus is quite far from what it may look like at the first glance. The specific is that the conflict has no nationalistic background at all.

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In his newest blog entry Pavol Demeš of the Central and Eastern Europe program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States compares the last European dictator with tough chess player who frequently uses forbidden moves to win.

“Despite opposition movements, Russian punishments, EU and U.S. sanctions, and color revolutions around him, he remains comfortably ensconced at his palace while European commissioners, patriarchs, popes, and other presidents have come and gone,” says Demeš.

The author reveals the secrets of Lukashenka’s self-made practices in international relations through prism of recent crackdown on Belarus’ Polish minority and upcoming presidential elections.

Belarus’ Aleksander Lukashenko, European Chess-master
GMF Blog
Posted on March 4, 2010

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — When Aleksander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, began a recent campaign to intimidate and punish members of the country’s disobedient Polish community, he opened a new front not only with neighboring Poland, but also with the EU as a whole that must now meet that challenge head on.

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A loud scandal involving the foreign Minister of Israel and money laundering via Belarusian banks is unfolding. Ze’ev Ben-Aryeh, the former Ambassador of Israel to Belarus, provided Avigdor Lieberman, the Foreign Minister of Israel, classified information when they met in Belarus in 2008.

That information suggested that Lieberman had accepted bribes and evaded taxes using Belarusian banks. Israeli authorities were hoping to cooperate secretly with the Belarusian authorities, but their ambassador kept a copy of the confidential files for himself, and later shared it with his boss Liberman.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

According to the statement released by police, Israel’s former ambassador to Belarus, Ze’ev Ben-Aryeh, allegedly showed Lieberman classified information regarding his investigation by police on allegations that he had accepted bribes and failed to report income to the tax authorities.

The documents had been sent to Ben-Aryeh by the Foreign Ministry to hand over to the Belarus government, whose help Israel required in tracing money transfers from a local bank.

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An attempt to influence the Belarusian regime through the Eastern Partnership has failed. At least so far, at least the first attempt of it. Russian newspaper Kommersant reports that the negotiations between a delegation of the European Parliament and the Belarusian officials on Belarus’ participation in the parliamentary assembly of EU and its Eastern neighbours (EURONEST PA) were unproductive.

It is now likely that the Belarusian delegation will be formed from the opposition parties and NGOs, Kommersant quoted MEP Justas Paleckis.

This means that once again the democratic opposition is likely to represent the country at an international forum. It would be virtually the same as if on such forum during the Cold War the USSR would be represented by the Soviet dissidents. The dissidents were brave and dignified individuals but they were neither politically influential nor representative of the whole country.

Belarus has been under authoritarian rule over 15 years. All these years the opposition has practically been deprived of any opportunities to influence on the government’s policies let alone representation in the parliament. The opposition has now practically transformed into a semi-dissident movement. It is able to give a picture of what is going on in Belarus and give advise to the EU in what policy to pursue with Belarus – but these consultations and even some financial and organizational support to Belarusian NGOs can hardly be considered a realistic policy.

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Stay off the potash is the title of Edward Lucas’s recent article in the Economist, where he reflects on effectiveness of trade boycotts. Although the piece is on trade boycotts, the same logic applies to economic sanctions in general. As to Belarus, the point is well-taken – the more Europe isolates Belarus, the stronger will be its dependence on undemocratic regimes such as Russia or China:

Penalising weak-kneed European countries is hard enough. It is even more difficult when trying to put pressure on the source of the problem. If you want to boycott Belarussian goods, say, because of that government’s persecution of its Polish minority, you are unlikely to change your lifestyle much, unless you use industrial quantities of potash or need a lot of cheap tractors.

For countries like Belarus, a trade boycott is outright counterproductive. The more Belarus trades with the rich industrialised world, the weaker will become the ties binding it to Russia. It may be reasonable to try to take custom away from companies that owe their existence to commercial ties with sleazy politicians. But such bodies tend not to sell anything that a normal consumer in the outside world is likely to buy directly. You may not like the fact that some pennies from your fuel bills eventually trickle into the coffers of Kremlin cronies, but there is not much you can do about it.

Indeed, there were good reasons for the European Union to introduce economic sanctions, but their effectiveness remains questionable. Belarus has not become more democratic, despite some promising rhetoric of its government and strained relations with Russia.

This suggests that different approaches are needed. Spreading uncensored information in Belarus and supporting Western-educated Belarusians to return home are likely to be the most effective.

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For those who are still not sure about Belarus privatization plans, there is another sign that the Government is serious about it.

Moscow Times reports that President Lukashenka invited the Rothschild Group to advise the government on evaluation of enterprises. Apparently, Belarus would not have invited the Rothschild Group to privatize small state-owned companies. Rothschild has been at the center of the world’s financial markets for over 200 years. It provides Investment Banking, Corporate Banking and Private Banking & Trust services to governments, corporations and individuals.

The Rothschild talks suggest that we may see something big on the privatization plate in the near future. Belarus authorities already have experience working with Rothschild. In 2009, Rothschild was involved in sale of one of the leading Belarus banks – BPS Bank, which was acquired by Russian Sberbank for $280,7 million. Moscow Times reports:

“We not only want to receive your [price] estimates of privatized companies, we would like to learn a lot from you,” Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka said at a meeting with top executive of the financial services group. “It would suit us very well to work with your specialists. If you agreed we could soon delegate several projects and work on them seriously.”

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A senior ideologist Mikalaj Čarhiniec, who had proposed to impose censorship restrictions on a concert of the German industrial rock band Rammstein, has demonstrated what the ideology of the current political regime in Belarus is.

Official ideology of today’s Belarus can be described as post-Soviet left-wing conservatism. The Belarusian government is principally averse to democracy and civil liberties. Therefore it also has a very negative attitude towards any cultural or social phenomena like drugs legalization or the LGBT rights movement.

Belarusian bloggers and foreign media have been actively discussing the prospectives if the concert’s cancellation. However, Andrej Hiro, Ambassador of Belarus to Germany, pointed out today that members of Rammstein had all received visas for Belarus and that the proposal to impose censorship restrictions on the concert had been “a private initiative”.

A scandal of this kind is nothing new for Rammstein. It could only increase the popularity of the band, which is probably more famous in Belarus than in Germany itself. In show business there is no such thing as bad PR after all.

Not content to oppress the country’s democratic opposition or rail against Western imperialism, the autocratic regime of Belarus has declared the German industrial rock band Rammstein to be an enemy of the state.

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The Vancouver Sun publishes an interview with four Belarusian fans at the 2010 Olympic Games. It’s a great pleasure to see the guys wearing sweaters with the historical Belarusian coat of arms Pahonia on them.

VANCOUVER — Belarus is a small land-locked country sandwiched between Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. The population is only 10 million, and mostly centered around the capital, Minsk.

But what it lacks in size, Belarus makes up for in Olympic spirit.

Thursday, Belarus picked up its first two medals of the 2010 games in the men’s and women’s biathalon. The same day, Ilya Kunitski, Pavel Kazlou, Pavel Surkov and Zmicer Kazak arrived in Vancouver to cheer on their country’s athletes.

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Despite having one of the highest student ratios in Europe, a virtually free higher education, and laws making study abroad difficult, the best and brightest young Belarusians continue flocking to or at least dreaming of expensive Western universities. The situation is exacerbated by Minsk’s practice of closing down independent-minded educational institutions and expelling Belarusian students and Western lecturers for refusing to toe the official line.

On February 18, representatives of the Nordic Council of Ministers visited the European Humanities University (EHU) in exile. EHU was founded in Minsk in 1992 “in order to open our minds to those values constituting the basic principles of democracy,” according to Professor Anatoli Mikhailov, EHU’s rector and one of its founders.

EHU was closed for political reasons in Belarus in 2004. It was then reorganized in Vilnius at the invitation of the Lithuanian government. Since 2006, EHU has enjoyed the status of a private Lithuanian university. Currently, EHU is the only Belarusian university offering western-standard education. EHU is also the only Belarusian university that still retains a degree of autonomy from the authorities.

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Tensions between Belarus and Poland rise as Belarus police arrested about 40 members of a Polish ethnic group. This is a continuation of increased pressure put against the Union of Poles in Belarus.

The Union is uncontrolled and unrecognized by the Belarusian authorities and competes with a pro-government organization of Poles. The Financial Times today devoted an article to the conflict:

Belarus, a country of about 10m, has a Polish minority of about 400,000, a remnant from pre-war times when western Belarus was a part of Poland. The Union of Poles in Belarus became the country’s largest nongovernment organisation after most opposition groups were driven underground by Mr Lukashenko, prompting the government to form a pro-regime Polish organisation in 2005 which took over the assets of the independent group.

Mr Lukashenko’s government was pushed to warm ties with Europe when his Russian allies tired of propping him up through cheap oil and gas and began to demand world prices for energy. Belarus’s ramshackle economy needed investment and new markets to survive, and Mr Lukashenko released all of his political prisoners in 2008 as a way of improving relations with the west.

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Members of the Belarusian-American Association responded to the new attack of the government of Belarus on the constitutional rights of their citizens by staging a protest in the very center of Washington, DC. The Russian service of the Voice of America covered the event supported by the Reporters Without Borders and WE REMEMBER Foundation.

Behind the extensive control over Internet access and online content that President Lukashenka has the obvious intention to reduce free expression in Belarus. Last year, the government claimed that China was a model in terns of Internet control. This year, President Lukashenka signed a decree subjecting online access in internet cafes to an identity check or to prior online authorization that depends on the applicant.

VB

Read more about this event and the problem in Russian at VOANEWS.com.