US Imposes Sanctions on Belarus after Stolen Election
The constitution of Belarus, the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorossia, said that the president couldn’t serve a third term. But like his ideological grandfather Joe Stalin, Alexander Lukashenko, currently in his second term, is not bound by such trifles. He merely organized a referendum, tilted the already skewed playing field, and mirabile dictu, the president can serve as long as he can get elected. The opposition won precisely no seats out of 110 in the last parliamentary election, so the odds favor the president.
President Lukashenko has been boss of Belarus since 1994. He is, at best, a hard-core nationalist and an anti-western illiberal. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin, former secret policeman himself, is somewhat embarrassed by Lukashenko’s old-guard approach to oppression – Mr. Lukashenko is rather like the crazy uncle kept in the attic about which the family says nothing. He maintains a centrally planned economy, his security force kept the name Komitet Gosudarstvenoye Bezopastnosti (Byelorussians speak Russian, with a bit of an accent, so the initials are still KGB), and members of the opposition “disappear” while journalists, most recently Veronika Cherkasova, have been killed mysteriously.
Of course, for a goon like this, it is not enough to merely run a totalitarian state. It must have the trappings of democratic legitimacy. The election was undoubtedly affected by the release on state TV (there is no other) of an exit poll showing the president getting his way while the polls were still open. This is, of course, unethical, but it is also against the country’s election law. Despite the broadcasting of the poll all day long, Central Elections Commission Chairwoman Lidiya Ermoshina insisted that there was no violation of election law to taint what she called the president’s “elegant victory.”
There is some good news. When the Soviet Union broke up, the US and the Russian Federation worked out a deal by which Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine surrendered all the ex-Soviet Union’s nukes that were on their territory. So, President Lukashenko is a dictator but a non-nuclear dictator. Europe doesn’t need a North Korea on the right side of its map.
Mr. Bush on Wednesday signed the Belorus Democracy Act. It does little beyond set up broadcasts into the country and ban various kinds of trade and financial assistance, but three cheers all the same. However, there isn’t much else the US can do so long as President Putin wants to keep Mr. Lukashenko in office. The question is why does Mr. Putin want to keep 10 million people under Mr. Lukashenko’s thumb?