BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

Tue, Oct. 04, 2005

Opposition movement gains momentum in, and outside of, Belarus

BY TOM HUNDLEY

Chicago Tribune

WARSAW, Poland - (KRT) - Ukraine's was orange; neighboring Georgia's was rose. But Belarus hasn't yet picked a color for its revolution.

Back in 1989, when the first winds of change toppled the Soviet empire like a house of cards, Czechoslovakia had a "velvet" revolution. Lucky Czechs, lucky Slovaks. Belarusians are not expecting a similar smooth ride.

"More like Romania maybe," said Anton Cialezhnikau, 23, a pro-democracy activist from Belarus. "Lukashenko is a pretty brutal leader and he has powerful instruments of repression at his disposal."

President Alexander Lukashenko is the big dog in what President Bush has described as the "last dictatorship in Europe."

But after "people power" managed to topple corrupt and undemocratic regimes in Ukraine last year and in Georgia the year before, there is a sense that Lukashenko's days might be numbered. An opposition movement is quietly building strength inside and outside the former Soviet republic wedged between Russia and Poland.

Poland has become a critical support base for the opposition movement. Last month, when Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and other heroes of 1989 gathered at the gates of the Gdansk shipyard for the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity movement, they used the occasion to remind the world that revolution is not yet complete. Later, at a rock concert in Warsaw, a band from Belarus called N.R.M. ignited a youthful audience, which began chanting: "Freedom for our neighbors."

Polish political leaders, meanwhile, have been banging the drum for the Belarus opposition in the European Union's corridors of power, urging the European powers to become more involved.

"The EU can't have a country like Belarus on its doorstep," Janusz Onyszkiewicz, the former Polish defense minister who now serves as vice president of the European parliament, told journalists.

All of this has infuriated Lukashenko, a former state farm boss and Soviet apparatchik who enjoys the political backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Lukashenko has retaliated against Warsaw with a harsh crackdown on ethnic Poles living in Belarus. Poland responded by recalling its ambassador in Minsk, and suddenly the Polish-Belarus border is one of the chilliest in Europe.

"Our view is that Europe is larger than the EU, and the EU should feel some responsibility for all of Europe," said Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, an analyst at the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw.

"But ask any Western European politician, `What's going on in Belarus?' and he'll think, `Well, how would Putin react to what I'm going to say,'" Wnuk-Lipinski said. "Most Europeans are stuck in this Cold War sensibility that Belarus somehow belongs to Russia." Or as Cialezhnikau, the pro-democracy activist, put it: "As long as the EU and the U.S. keeping trying to humor Putin, our situation will stay the same."

Cialezhnikau is typical of the new breed of young activists who have sparked peaceful regime change in Ukraine, Georgia and Serbia. A fourth-year university student, he is working on a degree in marketing and management. He and fellow activists eschew revolutionary rhetoric for business plans; beards for BlackBerries. The Internet is their weapon of choice.

"What we have is a business plan for beginning a revolution," said Vitali Locmanau, 28, an activist with the Union for Democracy Support in Belarus, an umbrella group based in Warsaw.

"Right now, we are networking private companies, NGO's (non-governmental organizations) and other people with financial resources to support the opposition. Then we need to do the political marketing," said Locmanau, who has a degree in economics and a day job as a marketing representative for a Polish company.

The main Belarus opposition group is Zubr, named for the bison that can still be found in the country's primeval forests. Modeled on Otpor in Serbia, Kmara in Georgia and Pora in Ukraine, Zubr is an organization dominated by twentysomethings specializing in nonviolent protest. But their nonviolent efforts are frequently met with violent suppression by the Lukashenko regime, which seems to live in a time warp.

In many ways, Belarus exists as a kind of Cold War-era Soviet republic preserved in aspic. The media are strictly controlled. State television broadcasts endless reports on agriculture, paeans to Lukashenko and little else.

The KGB is alive and well here. Even after the collapse of the USSR, the local branch in Belarus didn't bother to change its name.

"Why would they?" Locmanau asked. "It's a very strong brand name."

Last year, Lukashenko arrested Mikhail Marinich, a leading opposition figure, on trumped-up charges of stealing U.S. government property. The American Embassy in Minsk had lent Marinich several computers on the theory that borrowed embassy property would be harder for the host government to confiscate. Marinich is in jail.

Facing elections next year, Lukashenko recently appointed Viktor Sheiman as his chief of staff. According to prosecutors who have since fled the country, Sheiman's previous assignment was organizing the death squads that murdered four of Lukashenko's most bothersome political rivals. A month ago, Lukashenko banned foreign assistance for all political activity, clamped down on the ability of NGOs to operate freely in Belarus and made it much more difficult for young people to travel in and out of the country. For good measure, he also imposed strict limits on foreign music on the airwaves.

With an eye on the election, the Belarus opposition chose a former U.S.-educated physicist Sunday to challenge Lukashenko. About 800 representatives of Belarus' opposition parties and movements named Alexander Milinkevich as their candidate at a congress in Minsk.

"We believe that Belarus will be next after Georgia and Ukraine," Milinkevich told The Associated Press.

But the pro-democracy movement also understands the difficulty of the task ahead.

"Belarus was handed its independence on a silver platter," said Cialezhnikau, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. "Freedom came too easily. Now we understand that you have to earn it."

Source:

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/world/12813826.htm