Now that the regime of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has been caught red-handed rigging yet another election, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that the dramatic upheavals in the impoverished republic present Europe with its greatest challenge since Britons voted four years ago to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union.
The trouble is, most European leaders prefer to pretend that the Belarusian convulsions can be contained with meetings, “dialogue” and other such diplomatic stupidities of the kind the EU applied the last time, in 2015, and in 2010, and in 2006, after Lukashenko pulled off a 2004 constitutional term-limit heist that transformed his 1994 post-Soviet election win into a sinecure as president for life.
It’s not going to work this time around. The opposition is more determined. The street demonstrations are larger, by an order of magnitude. The repression is more obscene, and with Russian President Vladimir Putin threatening a military intervention on Lukashenko’s behalf, the stakes are higher than before. The Belarusian people have had enough.
This isn’t Mali or Myanmar. This is all happening in the heart of Europe, and either democracy wins, or Europe gets bested and beaten by a Moscow-backed thug regime that’s like something straight out of some Warsaw Pact nightmare.
But just getting the EU to consider imposing asset freezes and travel bans on some of Lukashenko’s police-state apparatchiks — Brussels sees targeting Lukashenko himself as far too rash — has required browbeating and brinkmanship. This week, the plucky Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia forced the EU’s hand, banning Lukashenko and 29 other officials and sanctioning them under their own laws. The Trump administration in Washington, which is notoriously solicitous of Putin and his friends at the best of times, is being distinctly EU-like in its timidity. The State Department is eyeing sanctions on seven officials.
Canada is at least saying the right sorts of things, but it took a week of massive protests — one demonstration brought about 250,000 people into the streets of the capital, Minsk — for Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne to utter more than his usual expressions of “concern.” Eight days after the Aug. 9 election, Champagne stated quite clearly: “We do not accept the results of this fraudulent presidential election in Belarus and call for free and fair elections.”
At least that’s something, but it’s less than the EU has said, and the EU’s intentions could not be more modest. A sanctions list is being drawn up by the EU’s foreign policy unit, and the names of Belarusian officials and organizations on the list will then require the unanimous approval of each of the EU’s 27 member states. The United Kingdom is expected to follow the EU’s lead, but not happily. The U.K. is the second-largest investor in Belarus, after Russia. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is engaged in an “intergovernmental trade dialogue” with Lukashenko.
The Aug. 9 election saw 80 per cent of the votes going to Lukashenko, a result nobody believes, owing to the innumerable documented instances of ballot boxes getting dumped, tallies calculated out of thin air, threats to election officers and phantom polling stations. Lukashenko’s main challenger was the 37-year-old language teacher Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who put in her name to run for the presidency only after her husband, the popular social-media figure Sergei Tikhanovsky, was arrested two days after declaring his intention to run.
In the lead-up to the vote, at least 700 opposition activists were rounded up, along with 17 journalists. After the vote results were announced and Lukashenko was declared the victor, protesters began pouring into the streets. Thousands of people have been arrested. Journalists working for the BBC, Reuters and the Associated Press have had their credentials revoked, and some have been deported. Journalists with the Belarusian state broadcaster who refused to report Lukashenko’s fictions have been fired and replaced with propagandists from Moscow’s RT news organization.
Immediately after the vote, Tikhanovskaya disappeared, then fled to Lithuania. She is expected to address the United Nations Security Council on Friday, for whatever good that might do, because the 2015 elections were also rigged and the UN was useless. The UN’s own special rapporteur on human rights in Belarus reported that fraud was widespread and Lukashenko’s victory could not be taken seriously: “The election process was orchestrated, and the result was preordained.”
But at least there wasn’t as much violence as in 2010 — the EU, the United States and Canada reckoned — so sanctions that had been imposed on Lukashenko’s regime were stupidly lifted. And Lukashenko was allowed to get away with it again.
During the 2010 election, seven presidential candidates were picked up by the Belarusian secret police, which still goes by Soviet-era nomenclature, calling itself the KGB. Hundreds of opposition activists were arrested in 2010, too, and the police violence was savage.
But the EU was eager to “engage” with the regime, and the U.S. wanted Lukashenko drawn out of Moscow’s orbit, so Lukashenko was allowed to carry on with almost complete impunity.
Ten years ago, the foreign ministers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic penned an essay condemning Europe’s complicity in Lukashenko’s brutality. His elections are a “charade,” and engagement with him was a “waste of time and money,” they wrote. “The EU’s recent record of promoting democracy in former Soviet republics has been pitiful.”
It has been especially pitiful in Belarus, and it’s still pitiful, and the country’s nearly 10 million impoverished and brutalized people are being made to suffer for it. Belarus’ per-capita gross domestic product was roughly equal to that of Albania, even before the coronavirus pandemic set in, and now Belarus has one of the highest infection rates in the world, and Lukashenko says COVID-19 is a “psychosis” that can be cured by drinking vodka, going to the sauna and driving tractors.
This can’t go on. Whether the EU likes it or not, Lukashenko is going to have to go, and whatever policy Brussels adopts, Lukashenko’s removal has to be central to it, whether Putin likes it or not.
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