Belarus is a well-educated country on the EU’s doorstep
Perhaps to humiliate Mr. Medvedev, perhaps to forestall the West, Russia’s government (headed by Mr. Putin) speedily repaired relations with the regime in Minsk.
Wrong Carrot, Wrong Stick
Yesterday’s presidential elections in Belarus are a powerful reminder that the history of democratic reform is not over in the lands of the East. The incumbent, Aleksandr Lukashenko, remains in office for a fourth term in a vote that has been widely denounced as fraudulent. In a CEPA exclusive, Senior Fellow and long-time Belarus watcher Edward Lucas offers a candid assessment of the elections, what they mean for the people of Belarus and how Lukashenko will use the aftermath to stay in power.
Carrots and sticks are a good way of moving the recalcitrant, in agriculture and geopolitics alike. But what if the donkey is too thick-skinned to mind about the stick and says he prefers thistles to carrots?
That is the upshot of yesterday’s dismal news from Belarus. The country’s autocratic leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, has retained power in a presidential election that outside observers reckon was grossly rigged. He has cracked down on the opposition: latest reports say that seven opposition candidates are under arrest. One, Vladimir Neklyayev, was seriously beaten, then hauled from his hospital bed in the early hours of the morning and taken to an unknown destination. Police arrested hundreds of opposition protestors in the center of Minsk and many others in the provinces.
Sadly, this is nothing unusual for Belarus: Mr. Lukashenko won a more or less fair election in 1994. But his second and third terms came as a result of fraud and bullying, widely condemned by western election observers, but condoned by their counterparts from Russian-led monitoring organizations.
In the run up to his fourth term, the European Union (EU) had hoped that Mr. Lukashenko might mend his ways, or at least scrub up a little. That culminated in a joint approach by Carl Bildt and Radosław Sikorski (respectively Swedish and Polish foreign ministers) in early November. They offered progress on free trade and visa liberalization plus nearly $4 billion in aid programs if Belarus started political reforms.
Nobody expected Mr. Lukashenko to leave power promptly. But the hope was that he would at least allow some semblance of a fair election and refrain from persecuting its losers. That would have allowed the EU to say that its policy of “engagement” with the regime was working: the idea, long spearheaded by Mr. Sikorski, was to drop sanctions gradually, which supposedly risk driving Belarus further into Russia’s arms, and to offer a series of incentives to the nomenklatura—the Belarusian elite. “We have to make them think that their future, and their children’s future, is in Brussels not Moscow,” a senior official explained.
On a parallel track, America (which also has sanctions on Belarus and withdrew its Ambassador in early 2008) has tried charm too. A meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Belarusian counterpart on December 1st praised Belarus for its decision to dispose of its highly enriched uranium stocks by 2012.
It all made sense on paper. Belarus is a well-educated country on the EU’s doorstep. It would integrate far more easily into the EU than other, more talked-about candidates such as Ukraine (seen as too big and too corrupt) or Turkey (too big and too Muslim). Nor is it like Russia, handicapped by dreams of regaining lost superpower status, or by historical hang-ups about neighboring countries. Seen from the diplomatic salon, Belarus looked like a prime target.
Yet many thought that a charm offensive policy was not just cynical, but doomed from the beginning. In any battle where bribes are the ammunition, Russia is going to out bid the West. Mr. Lukashenko’s regime has murdered its opponents and stolen large sums of money. It does dirty deals with some of the world’s most unpleasant regimes (Saddam Hussein’s air-defense system came from Belarus, and the military who operated it were trained there).
Those habits don’t change. In a clear snub to Mr. Sikorski, Mr. Lukashenko’s secret police (still called the KGB) continued its harassment of Polish minority organizations in western Belarus. It took only the most limited steps towards media freedom. Opposition candidates were allowed to run but faced beatings and other harassment. The biggest concession was probably to allow Western election monitors. But their presence has not helped. The announcement of a nearly 80 percent vote for Mr. Lukashenko on an equally implausible 90 percent turnout has dashed any hopes of change.
The big weakness in the Western approach was the assumption that Mr. Lukashenko was now scared of Russia and that the Russian authorities were repelled by him. Some evidence supported that: the earthy, ill-educated Mr. Lukashenko (a former collective farm manager) got on badly with Vladimir Putin and even worse with his nominal successor in the Kremlin, Dmitri Medvedev. In a startling public outburst this summer, Mr. Medvedev denounced Mr. Lukashenko as corrupt. Russian television picked up the theme enthusiastically. That eruption followed a simmering row over unpaid gas bills (cheap Russian energy keeps Belarus afloat).
Many thought that the Kremlin would pick and back its own candidate for the presidential election. Faced with a choice of being toppled by the Kremlin or making peace with the West, surely Mr. Lukashenko would choose the latter. Not so. Perhaps to humiliate Mr. Medvedev, perhaps to forestall the West, Russia’s government (headed by Mr. Putin) speedily repaired relations with the regime in Minsk. A humiliated Mr. Medvedev said tautly that the election was an “internal matter.”
The West is now left without a policy. Trying to topple Mr. Lukashenko with a Ukraine-style “Orange Revolution” now looks hopeless. Nearly 20 expensive years of foreign-financed “democracy promotion” in Belarus has brought little result: the opposition is still divided, penetrated by the KGB and on the margins of society. Hungary and Poland, which each have six months running the European Union in 2011, hoped that progress on Belarus was meant to be the centerpiece of their revival of the “Eastern Partnership” (a plan for better EU ties with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) in 2011. Not anymore.
And what of the wily, volatile Mr. Lukashenko? No great brain when it comes to economics or history, he understands the geopolitics of his own region. When tempers cool, he will continue playing east and west against each other. He knows how short memories are in Brussels and Moscow. After all, he’s been around a long time—and he intends to keep it that way.
Editor's Note: The original version of this article referred to the Belarusian President as "Aleksandr Lukashenka." The Belarusian spelling is "Alyaksandr Lukashenka," while the Russian spelling is "Aleksandr Lukashenko."
by Edward Lucas
Edward Lucas is Senior Editor at The Economist and Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Center for European Policy Analysis.
source: Center for European Policy Analysis
http://cepa.org/ced/view.aspx?record_id=280
Wrong Carrot, Wrong Stick
Yesterday’s presidential elections in Belarus are a powerful reminder that the history of democratic reform is not over in the lands of the East. The incumbent, Aleksandr Lukashenko, remains in office for a fourth term in a vote that has been widely denounced as fraudulent. In a CEPA exclusive, Senior Fellow and long-time Belarus watcher Edward Lucas offers a candid assessment of the elections, what they mean for the people of Belarus and how Lukashenko will use the aftermath to stay in power.
Carrots and sticks are a good way of moving the recalcitrant, in agriculture and geopolitics alike. But what if the donkey is too thick-skinned to mind about the stick and says he prefers thistles to carrots?
That is the upshot of yesterday’s dismal news from Belarus. The country’s autocratic leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, has retained power in a presidential election that outside observers reckon was grossly rigged. He has cracked down on the opposition: latest reports say that seven opposition candidates are under arrest. One, Vladimir Neklyayev, was seriously beaten, then hauled from his hospital bed in the early hours of the morning and taken to an unknown destination. Police arrested hundreds of opposition protestors in the center of Minsk and many others in the provinces.
Sadly, this is nothing unusual for Belarus: Mr. Lukashenko won a more or less fair election in 1994. But his second and third terms came as a result of fraud and bullying, widely condemned by western election observers, but condoned by their counterparts from Russian-led monitoring organizations.
In the run up to his fourth term, the European Union (EU) had hoped that Mr. Lukashenko might mend his ways, or at least scrub up a little. That culminated in a joint approach by Carl Bildt and Radosław Sikorski (respectively Swedish and Polish foreign ministers) in early November. They offered progress on free trade and visa liberalization plus nearly $4 billion in aid programs if Belarus started political reforms.
Nobody expected Mr. Lukashenko to leave power promptly. But the hope was that he would at least allow some semblance of a fair election and refrain from persecuting its losers. That would have allowed the EU to say that its policy of “engagement” with the regime was working: the idea, long spearheaded by Mr. Sikorski, was to drop sanctions gradually, which supposedly risk driving Belarus further into Russia’s arms, and to offer a series of incentives to the nomenklatura—the Belarusian elite. “We have to make them think that their future, and their children’s future, is in Brussels not Moscow,” a senior official explained.
On a parallel track, America (which also has sanctions on Belarus and withdrew its Ambassador in early 2008) has tried charm too. A meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Belarusian counterpart on December 1st praised Belarus for its decision to dispose of its highly enriched uranium stocks by 2012.
It all made sense on paper. Belarus is a well-educated country on the EU’s doorstep. It would integrate far more easily into the EU than other, more talked-about candidates such as Ukraine (seen as too big and too corrupt) or Turkey (too big and too Muslim). Nor is it like Russia, handicapped by dreams of regaining lost superpower status, or by historical hang-ups about neighboring countries. Seen from the diplomatic salon, Belarus looked like a prime target.
Yet many thought that a charm offensive policy was not just cynical, but doomed from the beginning. In any battle where bribes are the ammunition, Russia is going to out bid the West. Mr. Lukashenko’s regime has murdered its opponents and stolen large sums of money. It does dirty deals with some of the world’s most unpleasant regimes (Saddam Hussein’s air-defense system came from Belarus, and the military who operated it were trained there).
Those habits don’t change. In a clear snub to Mr. Sikorski, Mr. Lukashenko’s secret police (still called the KGB) continued its harassment of Polish minority organizations in western Belarus. It took only the most limited steps towards media freedom. Opposition candidates were allowed to run but faced beatings and other harassment. The biggest concession was probably to allow Western election monitors. But their presence has not helped. The announcement of a nearly 80 percent vote for Mr. Lukashenko on an equally implausible 90 percent turnout has dashed any hopes of change.
The big weakness in the Western approach was the assumption that Mr. Lukashenko was now scared of Russia and that the Russian authorities were repelled by him. Some evidence supported that: the earthy, ill-educated Mr. Lukashenko (a former collective farm manager) got on badly with Vladimir Putin and even worse with his nominal successor in the Kremlin, Dmitri Medvedev. In a startling public outburst this summer, Mr. Medvedev denounced Mr. Lukashenko as corrupt. Russian television picked up the theme enthusiastically. That eruption followed a simmering row over unpaid gas bills (cheap Russian energy keeps Belarus afloat).
Many thought that the Kremlin would pick and back its own candidate for the presidential election. Faced with a choice of being toppled by the Kremlin or making peace with the West, surely Mr. Lukashenko would choose the latter. Not so. Perhaps to humiliate Mr. Medvedev, perhaps to forestall the West, Russia’s government (headed by Mr. Putin) speedily repaired relations with the regime in Minsk. A humiliated Mr. Medvedev said tautly that the election was an “internal matter.”
The West is now left without a policy. Trying to topple Mr. Lukashenko with a Ukraine-style “Orange Revolution” now looks hopeless. Nearly 20 expensive years of foreign-financed “democracy promotion” in Belarus has brought little result: the opposition is still divided, penetrated by the KGB and on the margins of society. Hungary and Poland, which each have six months running the European Union in 2011, hoped that progress on Belarus was meant to be the centerpiece of their revival of the “Eastern Partnership” (a plan for better EU ties with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) in 2011. Not anymore.
And what of the wily, volatile Mr. Lukashenko? No great brain when it comes to economics or history, he understands the geopolitics of his own region. When tempers cool, he will continue playing east and west against each other. He knows how short memories are in Brussels and Moscow. After all, he’s been around a long time—and he intends to keep it that way.
Editor's Note: The original version of this article referred to the Belarusian President as "Aleksandr Lukashenka." The Belarusian spelling is "Alyaksandr Lukashenka," while the Russian spelling is "Aleksandr Lukashenko."
by Edward Lucas
Edward Lucas is Senior Editor at The Economist and Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Center for European Policy Analysis.
source: Center for European Policy Analysis
http://cepa.org/ced/view.aspx?record_id=280
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