Scorpion battle - politics in Belarus

National Review, Dec 23, 1996 by Mark Almond

EVERY report in the Western media agrees that the ex-Soviet republic of Belarus is heading for dictatorship and that the democrats there should be supported. No one favors accepting the results of the November 24 referendum, which endorsed a big increase in the president's powers at the expense of the parliament (still called the Supreme Soviet).

At first sight, then, it is difficult to quarrel with the seemingly universal Western opinion that President Aleksandr Lukashenko is bad news. After all, he was a minor Communist functionary and claims Cheka and KGB men Feliks Dzerzhinsky and Yuri Andropov among his heroes. He is outspokenly nostalgic for the old Soviet Union. Since his election as president in 1994, he has campaigned tirelessly for the reintegration of the Evil Empire. Internally, he did not much like the old constitution; much of what this referendum was about was his attempt to introduce a more authoritarian version. (A surprisingly high number of the Belarussian people voted for it.)

However, while all of this is true, to conclude that Lukashenko's opponents are knights in white armor battling for democracy is very naive.

The opposition to Lukashenko is concentrated in the Supreme Soviet, which was elected under dubious circumstances in 1995. When rebellious deputies last month defied the president, only a few, mainly elderly, protestors stood stoically in support of them. (Don't let close-up TV pictures give the impression of thousands.)

It was not difficult to see why young people -- or skeptics of any age -- found it difficult to associate the Supreme Soviet deputies with human rights and democracy. The opponents of the president are drawn from the continuing Communist Party and its rural offshoot, the Agrarians -- not natural pluralists at the best of times.

When I saw their leader, Speaker Semyon Sharetsky, his classic apparatchik's jowls and small piercing eyes reminded me of Orwell's pigs in Animal Farm. In fact, that work keeps its relevance today: when one sees Western diplomats fawning on the apparatchiks turned human-rights activists, the scene is horribly reminiscent of the end of the novella, when farmers and pigs celebrate their new-found alliance while the rest of the animals are left outside in the cold.

To Western reporters, the opposition mouths the language of human rights; off camera, they admit that a power struggle is going on. They dislike Lukashenko because he is monopolizing power and will not share the rapidly shrinking Belarussian pie with them. This makes them very indignant, and their language shows it.

When Lukashenko's opponents denounce him, their comparisons are striking. For them, he is a latter-day Pinochet or even Hitler --stringers for the Western press scribble all this down -- but oddly enough never a Communist tyrant. Of course, as members of an ongoing Communist Party, they still regard Lenin and Stalin as heroes.

While it is true that Lukashenko's own comparisons of himself with General de Gaulle in 1958 might not bear close scrutiny, they do indicate that he has broken free of the Communist pantheon of heroes -- and villains.

Lukashenko's opponents have gotten a favorable hearing not only from the Western press, but also from Western governments. The State Department's Nicholas Burns has plunged into the debate on their side -- which is where Clinton-watchers should smell a rat.

Last year, the first U.S. ambassador to Belarus, David Swartz, wrote a stinging attack on USAID policies in the former Soviet Union, using Belarus as a prime example. The two key American officials involved in misdirecting U.S. resources after 1991 were none other than Mr. Burns and his then-NSC boss, Tobi Gati. In the meantime, Mrs. Gati has come under fire for her generosity in sharing classified information with Washington's new friends in the former Soviet Union; Mr. Burns has been promoted. However, one of the Belarussian "democrats" Mr. Burns is now endorsing is Pyotr Kravchanka, then Belarus's first Foreign Minister -- and before that the Communist boss of Minsk.

Like other members of the Communist elite of Minsk, Kravchanka seems to have been bitterly disappointed when the newly elected President Lukashenko, who came from the backwoods even by Belarussian standards, turned out to be less pliable than he had expected.

Conscious of his own popularity at the grassroots level (and his firm control of the security services), Lukashenko ditched his would-be patrons. They have fought back, but their appeals have been directed to foreign governments and busybody groups rather than to their countrymen. Since the referendum, all the opposition did at home was to insist that the president's supporters had massaged the "Yes" vote upward -- though they admitted that their own level of 8 per cent was about right.

The failure of a popular opposition to emerge in Belarus is the real, big story of the present crisis. If the United States and her allies had tried to foster one, Lukashenko might have had to resort to strong-arming to stay in power.