Europe's Police State

After Xinjiang, here's a report from another forgotten benighted corner of the world. James Kirchick visits Belarus:

Walking the streets of Minsk, it does not take long to figure out that Belarus is a police state. The broad avenues in the center are spotlessly clean in a way that the streets in democratic countries simply are not. Men in uniforms walking slowly and sternly with batons affixed to their waists are ubiquitous; their purpose seems solely to intimidate. But the appearance of so many uniformed men on patrol, and the strong-arm tactics the regime uses to disperse peaceful demonstrations, can be deceptive. Belarus is not like Syria or Zimbabwe, where the government regularly tortures and kills political dissidents with impunity. Due to the Soviet-style economy, it doesn’t have to inflict violence on a wide scale to keep the population cowed. It can merely threaten the livelihoods of anyone who dare participate in a protest, never mind becomes involved in opposition politics. 

Worth reading in full for a look inside a country that is, effectively, still behind the iron curtain.

[Of course some people like police states. Stewart Parker, for instance, author of The Last Soviet Republic: Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus. He writes enthusiastically at The Marxist-Leninist on last December's elections. Let's first remind ourselves of what the Economist had to say:

It would be more honest if Alyaksandr Lukashenka, Belarus's thuggish and dictatorial president, did away with elections altogether. Instead, yesterday's charade of a poll resulted in false expectations and cracked skulls. As the country's slavish electoral committee declared Mr Lukashenka the winner, with 80% of votes on an improbable turnout of more than 90%, the true outcome of this election began to emerge.

Last night a massive demonstration of some 30,000 people was brutally dispersed by the Belarusian KGB and riot police. Six hundred people have been arrested. Many more have been beaten up. Seven of the nine candidates standing against Mr Lukashenka are in prison, some of them badly hurt. Their supporters are being hunted by the local KGB. Vladimir Neklyayev, a poet and one of the main candidates, was knocked unconscious as he tried to make his way to a demonstration. Later security services removed him from hospital—as his wife, reportedly, screamed from a locked room—and placed him in detention....

None of this was visible to the starry-eyed Parker, who could see only the triumph of a genuine people's democracy saved from the ravages of international capital by its heroic leader - and therefore by its example a threat to Western hegemony:

Although Belarus has a market economy, it has shown all too clearly what is possible when governments and presidents run a country not in the interests of foreign capitalists, or even solely in the interests of domestic capitalists, but actually take care of the interests of working people too. Belarusian MPs, and indeed President Lukashenko, come from very ordinary backgrounds, and the country operates a people’s assembly in which representatives from all areas and occupations discuss state policy with the president and government officials.

He notes, in a comment at the end, "Belarus is a country that tends to slip under the radar of most people especially on the left, who should be supporting it and holding it up as an example of a socially oriented system that works."

Oh yes.]

Comments

[Martin Adamson]

One of the bizarre, Ghadaffi-like whims that Lukashenko recently seems to have imposed is insisting that ethnic Russians and Ukrainians spell their names as if they were Belarussian - as evidenced by the Economist spelling his name Aljaksandr Lukashenka rather than Aleksandr Lukashenko, as his mother knew him.

[DaninVan]

It's a downhill ride from here on in. Pat Condell's latest...(oven mitts req'd!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGQIxYfKKtc&feature=player_embedded