BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

01/10/2008

Lukashenko's Factitious Humility

By Dmitry Babich

Russia Profile

Belarusian Elections Proved that Lukashenko Is Independent both from Russia and the EU

The Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko went to enormous lengths in criticizing himself on the subject of last Sunday's elections, which, against commonly held expectations, did not bring a single opposition candidate into the Chamber of Representatives, the Belarusian parliament.

During his meeting with the head of OSCE's observer mission Anne-Marie Lizin, Lukashenko said that he was ready to cooperate with the West. "We shall ponder what you said, we shall analyze the reactions of other observers and analysts. We shall think, we shall analyze and definitely we shall work on our mistakes," Lukashenko was reported by the official BelaPAN news agency as saying.

By Lukashenko's standards, the mere mentioning of one's own mistakes is tantamount to total self-effacement. As for the promise to work on one's mistakes, for Lukashenko it is the height of Christian humility, not even a hand outstretched, but a body reclined in the most exquisite and humble bow. Normally combative and outspoken in his statements, the Belarusian president even made fun of the Russian officials in the 1990s for "apologizing to the West all the time." So, what brought about this behavioral change?

During the same conversation with Lizin, Lukashenko in fact revealed his motives. "We expect from you cancellation of the sanctions which you introduced, thus insulting Belarusian people," Lukashenko said.

The EU's ruling bodies have been introducing new sanctions against Belarus since 1996, when Lukashenko started taking the first steps toward reintegration with Russia, coupled with consolidation of his own personal power in Belarus. The EU's sanctions have an effect on several Belarusian enterprises, and effectively bar president Lukashenko and his milieu from holding bank accounts or traveling in EU countries.

"We do not require money or integration into the EU from you. But if in this cooperation - economic and political one - Europe makes two steps forward, we shall make three," Lukashenko said.

But, if Lukashenko truly needed the sanctions to be lifted, why didn't he allow so much as a small opposition faction in the parliament, which has few powers and is dominated by his supporters anyway? In the run up to the election, Lukashenko amnestied Alexander Kozulin, an opposition leader and the former rector of Belarusian State University. This was a fulfillment of a demand from the United States, which has made the release of Kozulin a condition for improving relations with Belarus. This summer, relations between Minsk and Washington reached their all-time-low, with the United States imposing sanctions on Belnefrtekhim, a Belarusian petrol company, and Belarus making the Americans cut their Minsk embassy staff. Sources inside Belarusian television say that on the eve of the elections, television channels got a secret order to brace up for inviting the winning opposition candidates to come on the air. But something did not work.

"I don't exclude that Lukashenko canceled his 'democratization' plans under pressure from Moscow at the last minute," said Waclaw Radziwinowicz, a longtime correspondent of the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza in Minsk. "The top men in Russia, where even the controversial decision on recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia was adopted by the parliament unanimously, did not want Lukashenko to look like a greater democrat than them."

However, Anatoly Lebedko, the head of the opposition United Civic Party of Belarus, warns the West against considering Lukashenko "a puppet of Moscow."

"Lukashenko is not a Russian agent. But he is a man with a maniacal longing for power," Lebedko said. "The ideology that he represents is indeed more complex than some of the Western observers think. It can be summed up as new authoritarianism and it emerged as a reaction to the difficulties of the transition period from communism to democracy and capitalism. In many CIS countries this reaction is reduced to some grumbling of the common people. In Belarus, this ideology entered the corridors of power."

Just like in Russia, Lukashenko's new authoritarianism is based not only on people's trust in a "strong hand," but also on the inferiority complex before the West, which often transforms itself into historic theories blaming the West for all of his country's woes.

"Europe has no right to introduce sanctions against us for two reasons," Lukashenko said, talking to Lizin. "Firstly, we defended all of Europe during the last big war. Secondly, the Chernobyl tragedy. We did not build that station, we did not run it, we did not explode it, but 85 percent of the problems fell on Belarus. By introducing sanctions, you are hoisting a European Chernobyl on us."

This does not sound like Christian humility anymore-it sounds like the old (and not very good) Alexander Lukashenko. And if the president is the same old Lukashenko, why should the elections be different?

Source:

http://www.russiaprofile.org/page.php?pageid=International&articleid=a1222875653

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