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US Ambassador admits Washington is subverting the Belarus presidential
election
by Stephen Gowans
The United States has launched a
massive campaign to subvert the September
9th Belarusian presidential
election in a effort to topple President
Alexander Lukashenka, who has been
moving slower on "free market reforms"
than Washington would like. And
Washington is using a strategy similar to one
it used to oust the Nicaraguan
Sandinista government in the 80's, and to
depose Slobodan Milosevic in
Yugoslavia last year.
The campaign, which involves funneling money to
non-governmental agencies
(NGO's) opposed to Lukashenka, a youth group
reminiscent of the US-backed
Serb resistance group that was instrumental in
toppling Slobodan Milosevic,
and Radio Free Europe broadcasts urging
Belarusians to vote for Lukashenka's
US-backed opponent, was revealed by the
US Ambassador to Belarus, Michael
Kozak.
Nicknamed "the weasel" by
former CIA director William Casey, Kozak served as
Principal Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, working in
Panama and El
Salvador in the 80's, and in Nicaragua at a time Washington was
employing
various shady and illegal means to topple the Sandanistas,
including
illegally funneling money to the Contras. In a startling letter to
a
British newspaper, Kozak revealed last week that Washington's "objective
and to some degree methodology are the same" in Belarus as in
Nicaragua,
sparking fears that Washington is prepared to up the ante if
Lukanshenka wins
the September 9th election.
In mid-August, according to
Belarusian TV, Kozak told ex-Grodno Region
Governor Semyon Domash to
withdraw his candidacy for presidency and throw his
support behind Vladimir
Goncharyk , a trade union leader and former
Communist. Goncharyk agreed to
make Domash his prime minister should he win.
Last year, US Secretary
of State Madleine Albright had similarly directed the
fractured Yugoslav
opposition to coalesce around a single candidate to
contest a presidential
election in which Slobodan Milosevic, incongruously
branded a dictator,
stood as Socialist Party candidate. Washington funneled
millions into the
coalition's war chest, and insisted that Vojislav
Kostunica, admired as a
Serb patriot, lead the coalition.
But Washington's hopes that Lukanshenka
will lose the election could be
dashed. An August 23rd AFP report says that
Goncharyk "recorded only a 10
percent approval rating in a recent opinion
poll."
Lukashenka, long demonized in the Western press, has come in for some
particularly harsh treatment in the runup to the September 9th election. The
Wall Street Journal calls Lukashenka's Belarus a "semi-fascist" state . The
Washington Times calls the country an "authoritarian police state" and
an
"unabashed dictatorship." Lukashenka is variously described as a
strongman,
hard-liner, tyrant, and Europe's last dictator, in a
reprise of the campaign
that painted Milosevic in similarly menacing hues.
And, to top off the
allegations, Ambassador Kozak calls Belarus "worse than
Cuba."
But the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG), which sent
observers to
the country, says the charge that Belarus is worse than Cuba is
puzzling.
Belarus has multi-party elections, allows the opposition
access to the media,
and welcomes foreign human rights monitors into the
country. Cuba allows none
of these things. And Cuba hasn't allowed an
American General into the country
since 1959, yet Belarus allowed NATO
Supreme Allied Commander General Jospeh
Ralston to visit the country on July
23 to address a press conference
critical of Lukashenka. And while Cuba
regularly jams US-sponsored
anti-Castro Radio Marti broadcasts,
anti-Lukashenka Radio Free Europe
broadcasts go unchallenged.
Moreover, says the human rights group, "even President Lukashenka's most
vehement opponents refused to characterize him as a tyrant or dictator, and
none of the President's critics alleged even a significant degree of
repression in society in general."
US-sponsored anti-Lukashenka Radio
Free Europe broadcasts have doubled during
the election period, backing up
an already substantial collection of
US-funded NGO's arrayed against the
Belarusian president. A spokesperson at
the US Embassy in Minsk told The
(London) Times that the embassy helped to
fund 300 NGOs, including media,
many of which are opposed to Lukashenka. And
a youth group, Zubr, bearing a
uncanny resemblance to Otpor, the
anti-Milosevic student group
trained and funded by Washington, has been
putting up stickers that portray
Lukashenka as a criminal.
Despite its massive efforts to sway the vote
against Lukashenka, Washington
is hedging its bets. The State Department has
already warned that the
election will be flawed. Critics point out
that this is a
"heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" strategy, where Washington
insists the fairness
of the election be judged on the basis of whether
its candidate wins.
Washington used the same approach in last year's
presidential elections in
Yugoslavia, warning, when it was clear Milosevic
would do well at the polls,
that the election would be fraudulent.
Ironically, Washington pre-condemns as unfair elections its favored
candidates stand a good chance of losing, but is blissfully unconcerned
about
whether its massive funding of opposition groups and the
antigovernment press
severely limits the freedom and fairness of the
elections it intervenes in.
Americans are prepared to tolerate no foreign
intervention in their own
electoral affairs, or even to allow monitors to
oversee their own elections.
Key to Washington's campaign against Lukashenka
in the West is portraying the
Belarusian president as a repressive tyrant,
an ominous sign that the White
House may be softening Western public
opinion for more drastic measures
should Lukashenka win the election. But
the BHHRG says that "opposition
criticism of Lukashenka's Belarus lays
the emphasis on matters such as
foreign investment and the need to move
closer to the Western mainstream,"
not human rights abuses or political
repression. Political repression is a
Washington invention.
Writing in
the American Spectator, Daniel McAdams says that Washington's real
beef with
Lukashenka is that he hasn't moved fast enough on economic reforms,
not his
human rights abuses, which are grossly exaggerated, even fabricated,
and, even if they were real, are hardly different from those of former
Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who Washington supported. McAdams points
out
that the usual complaint about Lukashenka is that he abolished the
parliament, cheats on elections, and is autocratic. But Boris Yeltsin ruled
almost exclusively by decree, cheated on every election, and blew up a
parliament he didn't like. Argues McAdams, the difference between Yeltsin,
the admired reformer, and Lukashenko, smeared as an autocrat, is that
Yeltsin was enthusiastic about embracing the free market, while Lukashenka's
passions for free market reforms have proved less than overwhelming.
Belarus produces a number of consumer and industrial goods, including
refrigerators, tractors, televisions, trucks, buses, petrochemicals,
fertilizers, tires, not privately, but all under state control. Washington,
and the US-backed opposition would rather state owned enterprises be
privately owned, and Belarus throw open its doors to outside, and mainly US,
investment.
But Lukashenka, and many Belarusians, fear that
economic reforms will
produce the disasters that have befallen former
Communist countries that have
embraced the free market, like Poland
and Russia. Russia, once offering a
comfortable and secure material
existence to all its citizens, has seen the
number of its citizens living on
less than $4 a day grow from 4 million to
147 million since adopting free
market reforms.
Pro-reformers say Russian's economic woes are simply
"normal bumps on the
road to a market economy," but Belarusians have good
reasons not to want to
go over the same terrain.
Soviet Russia cranked
out more engineers and scientists than any country in
the world.
Today, 10 million Russian children don't go to school. In 10
years the
economy has shrunk by half. Real incomes have plunged 40 percent. A
third of
the country lives in extreme poverty, many on the verge of
starvation.
Eighty per cent of the people have no savings. Life expectancy
for men has
fallen to 19th century levels. The suicide rate has doubled;
alcoholism has
tripled. Old diseases, once thought eliminated – cholera,
typhus, diphtheria
– have come roaring back. The last ten years has seen, as
Stephen Cohen of
New York University puts it, the "endless collapse of
everything essential
to a decent existence."
Lukashenka is said to believe that the economy
should serve the people, not
the other way around, an out-of-fashion idea,
and not one Washington is
prepared, or has ever been prepared, to tolerate.
US governments have a long history of subverting elections when it looked
like electorates might make irresponsible choices, as Henry Kissinger
once
said of Chile's fondness for electing Slavador Allende, a man whose
commitment to the free-market was as lukewarm as Lukashenka's. In those
days,
you could point to Allende's alleged cozying up to Communism to
justify the
subversion of democracy. Today, with the Communist menace
inconveniently
departed, another, equally contrived menace, is pressed into
service --
abuses of civil and political rights.
Apart from the infamous
intervention of Washington into the electoral affairs
of Chile, the US has
intervened in numerous elections to assure that its
operating principle
prevails: we'll accept the outcome of democracy, just as
long as it's
agreeable to America's vital interests, vital interests being a
vague, but
high-sounding phrase, that reduces to: our right to economically
dominate
any part of the world we choice, which these days, on top of the
Balkans, includes Belarus.
And so, as the days count down to the
September 9th election, Lukashenka
gets, what researcher and writer Rick
Rozoff calls, "the Milosevic
treatment." If Washington can't turn Belarus's
electorate against Lukashenka,
it's prepared to turn Western public opinion
against him, and when it's
prepared to do that, Washington is preparing to
show its darker side.
Lukashenka is a marked man. And all because he thinks
the economy should
serve the people.
Mr. Steve Gowans is a writer and
political activist who lives in Ottawa,
Canada.
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