By: Cristina Odone
LONDON
— Tom Stoppard, the celebrated playwright, is hailed as a bard for our
times, who has been showered with awards for his work. Yet Sir Tom
(Queen Elizabeth II knighted the Czech émigré in 1997) cannot mask the
catch in his throat when he tells me about a review The New York Times
published on January 17, 2013. The reviewer, Ben Brantley described
Minsk 2011 as beautiful and brutal and enthused about its mythic
quality.
You couldn’t hope for a better review, could you?
Sir Tom is basking in reflected glory. The play is not his,
but the work of the Belarus Free Theater, a company that he has long
championed that was banned from performing in their homeland because of
their daring criticism of Aleksander Lukashenko, the Belarusian
autocrat.
Stoppard has also been helping another
Lukashenko foe, Andrey Sannikov. The former deputy foreign minister was
tortured and imprisoned for standing against Lukashenko in the December
2010 presidential elections. His show trial two years ago came to a
dramatic standstill when a letter of support by Tom Stoppard was read
out. Sannikov attributes his release (after 16 months in prison) to the
playwright’s intervention.
But despite their victory, neither the dissident
nor playwright is capable of really opposing Aleksander Lukashenko. The
man known as Europe’s last dictator has held his country in an iron
grip for 19 years. Under him, Belarus, a country the size of Kansas,
with 9.5 million inhabitants, has earned one of the worst records on
political rights and civil liberties in the world. The regime has
carefully orchestrated every election and national referendum since
1994.
The first line of the national anthem may
proclaim, We are Belarusians, a peaceful people, but
a secret death
squad has been in operation since the late 1990s. A dozen members of the
opposition have disappeared and a number of activists are thought to be
political prisoners.
Lukashenko’s regime has dealt with the
opposition by literally murdering a small number of people, Stoppard
tells me.
The Belarusian KGB (Lukashenko has clung to the old Soviet
name and model for his secret police) keeps an eye on their fellow
citizens. New laws make that all the easier, especially online, with the
government investing heavily in the development of software to track
Internet users i.e. 55 percent of Belarusians over the age of 15.
Lukashenko has also been orchestrating cyber attacks against activists.
On December 19, 2010, the day of the last presidential elections,
opposition sites were blocked. By 2 p.m. local time, access to mail and
Facebook were blocked, and by 4 p.m. almost all independent websites
were inaccessible.
Belarus is Europe’s dirty little secret. Its
existence should fill Europeans with shame and the European Union with
guilt. The institution that likes to grandstand about a common moral
purpose and a sterling record on rights has done little to clean up the
mess on its doorstep. Belarus may not be a member, but it routinely
deals with the European Union — which actually tends to put its
weaknesses on vivid display.
Andrey Sannikov certainly thinks
so. Exiled to a town just outside London, he feels at once baffled and
frustrated by Western (and in particular European) indifference to his
compatriots’ plight. Self-interest should prompt them to action, he
argues:
Westerners should remember that what happens in Belarus affects
them. Lukashenko has established ties with other rogue states around the
world, and supplied terrorists with arms. Gadhafi, Iran, Sudan, even
Saddam Hussein: Lukashenko has sold arms to them all.
Self-interest does feature in the West’s
dealings with Belarus. But not in the way Sannikov hopes. E.U. countries
like the Netherlands and Latvia buy cheap oil products from Belarusian
refineries. In the first six months of last year alone,
Lukashenko
earned $8 billion from the trade.
The surveillance equipment he uses to spy on his
citizens is made by Swedish telecommunication giant Ericsson — though
when confronted by Index on Censorship, Ericsson explained that this was
because the company had sold its equipment to Turkcell, a Turkish cell
phone operator, which in turn had sold their wares to Belarus.
B
ritain, meanwhile, last year sold to Belarus
some $4.7 million worth of arms. The government-sponsored Joint Arms
Control Implementation Group has invited Belarusian officers later this
year to Britain, where they are supposed to receive training in managing
Belarus’ weapons stockpile.
Is it any wonder the Belarusian opposition
thinks Europe is propping up the last dictatorship? Sannikov persists
with his mission:
to oust Aleksandr Lukashenko. The West finds it
convenient to portray Belarus as a basket case, he says indignantly,
because depicting Belarusians as passive and brutalized makes it easier
for Europeans to wash their hands of their troublesome neighbors.
It’s difficult, despite Sannikov’s patriotic
fervor, not to view his homeland as a hopeless cause. Belarus has long
been a geographical expression, but it only gained independence in 1918 —
and even then for only a few months.
Sandwiched between Europe and
Russia, Belarus was the center of the Holocaust, according to Timothy
Snyder, and the route number one for the Nazis’ invasion of the USSR in
1941.
One of the founding republics of the old Soviet
Union, Belarus played an instrumental part in the USSR’s dissolution.
But it has never managed to emerge from the Kremlin’s orbit. Today it
remains sorely dependent on Russia for its energy supplies. A telling
sign of Belarusians’ weak sense of identity is that most citizens speak
Russian rather than Belarusian at home. As for their leader, Lukashenko
uses Russian for all official functions — though the wily dictator may
do this to please Vladimir Putin. The two leaders have had their
run-ins, though. Only last year, Russian television broadcast an
unflattering four-part series titled The Godfather, as it dubbed the
Belarusian dictator.
The Mafia soubriquet fits only to a point.
Lukashenko often plays the clown, Berlusconi-style. When Guido
Westerwelle, Germany’s gay foreign minister, warned him recently that
the European Union would recall their ambassadors from Minsk in protest
at his dictatorial regime,
Lukashenko replied that I’d rather be a
dictator than gay. Such reckless behavior stems from Lukashenko’s
knowledge that the West wants to keep Belarus on the side.
He ably plays
Russia against the European Union and is not above using political
prisoners as bargaining chips — but only, Sannikov claims, because
Europe allows it. They enter into secret negotiations and promise
Lukashenko something in return... It’s tit for tat, a loan for a
prisoner. (
E.U. bilateral assistance to Belarus consisted of 28.50
million euros in 2012-2013, mostly in the area of environment, education
and cross-border cooperation.)
Despite the bleak history of his
homeland and the cunning ploys of its dictator, Andrey Sannikov has no
time for those who claim Belarusians are not interested in democracy.
For Sannikov, democracy is about aspiration, not habit. When a group of
people gather across a kitchen table, or over the factory assembly line,
or in a youth group, and talk of making changes — that is civil
society. It exists in Belarus as in North Korea and China.
It simply
isn’t allowed to have legal channels in these countries.
Natalia Kaliada, who with her husband Nikolai
Khalezin founded the Free Belarus Theatre, was arrested at the 2010
election protests. She recalls being pulled up into a paddy wagon. It
was one of those specially built ones, to fit 70-80 people. "I was
shouting, and the police shouted back "face the floor, don’t look
around!" But then I remembered I’d been told that when you are taken,
you must immediately collect all the names of those around you, then
text them to someone abroad before they take your phone away. I managed
to send many names... but then
the police started shouting that they
would rape us women and take us into a wood and shoot us."
Kaliada was taken instead to a detention center
already full of women protesters. She was released 48 hours later, and
escaped through Russia to London. Her family has joined her there.
Like Sannikov, she believes that so many
(Belarusians) have experienced first-hand the brutality of the
authorities, they will realize they cannot live with this regime. They
will, she firmly believes, turn to the opposition. Lukashenko controls
the media, but there were 30,000 witnesses that day.
Sannikov believes that those 30,000 protesters
will soon swell into 300,000. He points to the latest polls, which show
that although a third of citizens support Lukashenko, 15 per cent now
side with the opposition.
He believes he can stoke the fires of democracy
from abroad — with a little help from his friends in the west. His
confidence lies in part in Charter 97, the opposition website he helped
found. It can be populist and sensationalist, a former diplomat
explains, but the website is great propaganda. Not only critics of the
regime but an awful lot of high-up civil servants and government
ministers are reading the site.
Sometimes, Sannikov points out, grinning, regime
officials quote from the website... even on air. The internet means we
can work abroad but reach those inside.
But Charter 97 alone will not transform Belarus.
Sannikov calls on the West to help him and the opposition by adopting
tougher sanctions. The recalling of ambassadors was one step. The
European Commission also has drawn up a list of undesirables who may not
cross its frontiers, and whose assets in the E.U. will be frozen.
Marietje Schaake, a Dutch MEP who
has long campaigned for a more robust E.U. stance in regards to
Belarus, admits that none of the European Union’s restrictive measures
has had much impact on the policies or actions of the Belarusian
government. On April 1, 2013, their foreign minister (Vladimir Makei)
said his country was ready for dialogue with the E.U. — but without any
pressure or threat of sanctions.
When targeted sanctions, and his own heroic opposition, fail to dent a dictatorship, what can Sannikov do?
Exchange students, scout trips, cycle tours and
spa tourism: Greater exchange with the West, at every level of society,
will make the
Belarusian people see for themselves freedom of speech, of
the press, the rule of law. They won’t accept their oppression anymore.
Sannikov wants to persuade the European Union to
change their visa requirements: Traveling abroad is allowed — but to
date the West has made it difficult, as obtaining a visa is
time-consuming and expensive. This may change, according to Marietje
Schaake. The European Union wants to start negotiations on visa
facilitation and readmission agreements for the public at large. The
Belarusian government has not yet replied to the offer, and Schaake says
this speaks volumes for Lukashenko’s desire for isolation.
After all,
she argues, the dogma and doctrine is easily challenged when people
experience a higher quality of life abroad.
While Lukashenko mulls over his options — can he
afford to tweak Europe’s nose once more? Will Vladimir repudiate him if
he doesn’t? —
Sannikov believes his own role is to keep Belarus on the
international agenda.
It will be difficult, Tom Stoppard warns: What
are a handful of murders in comparison to the massacres we see daily in
Syria? What are a dozen disappeared in comparison to the scenes of
destruction of the Arab Spring? He pauses. But there is one reason why
Belarus should matter to us: This is Europe.
Cristina Odone is a
columnist for The Daily Telegraph
and a Research Fellow at the Centre
for Policy Studies in London.
She is also the editor of Free Faith.
