BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

Thursday, February 24, 2005

In Belarus and Moldova, hopes for democracy

By Judy Dempsey The New York Times

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia The popular uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine have raised the morale of the small opposition movements in Belarus and Moldova, and they said Wednesday that they were more determined than ever to continue the struggle for democracy.

"It will take time, but it will come," said Andrei Safonov, a political analyst and journalist from Transnistria, a separatist and internationally unrecognized enclave in eastern Moldova that is ruled by an authoritarian group backed by Moscow.

Civil society groups attending a conference in Bratislava on Wednesday, the day before President George W. Bush was to meet with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, said they had learned a huge amount from the movements that had peacefully overthrown authoritarian regimes in Slovakia, Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine.

A crucial lesson, they said, was in using the Internet as a powerful tool to defeat state-controlled media.

The conference, organized by the German Marshall Fund of the United States along with the Slovak Foreign Policy Association and the Institute for Public Affairs, tried to analyze how the experiences from those nonviolent uprisings influenced each other.

Although civil society groups from Belarus and Moldova said they had no illusions about what it would take to organize movements and a clandestine information system to coordinate the opposition, they were increasingly confident that democracy would succeed, despite Russia's attempts to prevent it.

"If it can happen in Georgia and Ukraine, then it can happen in Belarus," said Irina Krasovskaya, president of We Remember Foundation, which she established in Belarus in 1999 after her husband, Anatoly Krasovsky, and the vice president of Parliament, Victor Gonchar, disappeared. They have never been found.

Bush, on the last leg of his five-day trip to Europe, is expected to urged Putin on Thursday to cease his support for authoritarian governments in Belarus and Moldova and to stop meddling in Georgia. More than 16 months ago, the nonviolent "Rose Revolution" in Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze from power. Nevertheless, Russian troops remain in the country and continue to support separate movements that undermine Georgia's territorial integrity and stability.

Since the changes in Georgia, and earlier in Slovakia and Serbia, two of Russia's traditional allies, Putin has witnessed extraordinary changes in his country's borders.

The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, once under Moscow's control, joined NATO in April and the European Union a month later. At the same time, Poland and the other former communist countries of Central Europe also joined the EU. Then, despite Putin's open backing in November for the incumbent Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich, in his bid to seek re-election, the opposition ousted the pro-Russian government and voted in the pro-European Viktor Yushchenko.

"Putin is becoming isolated and even paranoid," said Carl Gershman, president of the U.S National Endowment for Democracy. "The lessons of Ukraine have not been learned. Russia's reaction is to dig in."

This response by Russia gives the U.S. a crucial role, not only in terms of financial support but political as well, according to these civil society groups. For them, Bush's State of the Union address last month in which he spelled out his vision for spreading democracy was a psychologically important signal to them.

"Bush is a big supporter of democracy and in our part of the world as well," said Andrei Sannikov, a former Belarusian deputy foreign minister who is the co-founder of the civil initiative Charter '97 and a staunch critic of President Alexander Lukashenka, who has intensified his crackdown on opposition and independent media.

Yet many of those interviewed also said that financial support and political backing by the U.S. or the EU had not been sufficient to oust the authoritarian regimes in Slovakia and Serbia, and in future, Belarus and Moldova.

"Aid cannot do it alone," said Ivan Vejvoda, a founder of the Democratic Forum in Belgrade that helped galvanize civil society for the eventual overthrow of former President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. "If you don't have the people, all the aid in the world cannot do it for you," he said.

Instead, the participants said there were common threads running through the civil society movements that helped them overthrow authoritarian rulers.

When the Slovak opposition ousted President Vladimir Meciar from power in 1998, they had two things working in their favor.

One was the immense lure of joining the EU and NATO. The other was the Internet as a powerful tool used by opposition groups to coordinate, inform and organize.

Serhiy Yevtushenko, head of the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Integration in Kiev and adviser to Ukraine's new foreign minister, said the opposition in his country had learned lessons from the Slovak, Serbian and Georgian experiences.

"We talked to each other about our experiences. We used the Internet. We taught journalists. We created networks. We coordinated," he said.

"No authoritarian regime can continue in power when millions of people are mobilized, motivated and demonstrate," added Yevtushenko, 29.

What the changes in these countries showed, said Pavol Demes, who helped organized the opposition to Meciar and then went on to advise the opposition in Serbia and Ukraine, was that "soft tools for change can work."

SOURCE:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/23/news/slovak.html


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