The Reality of Belarus?

international | politics / elections | opinion/analysis Monday April 10, 2006 14:43 by Elephant O'Room elephant_room at yahoo dot co dot uk

Democracy shouldn't involve bowing to the west

With many having been ‘burned’ by the coverage of earlier revolutions in ex-Soviet satellite states, the recent mainstream media (MSM) coverage of the Belarusian election and the situation in the country appeared to be, to put it lightly, more than a little simplistic and one-sided....

Keeping in with the sponsor: Belarussian opposition activists rally before the poll

A minimal amount of digging will show up holes in the propagandist dictatorial/bad economy line being spun about Belarus by the MSM. In fact, when compared to it’s neighbours, it’s an economic success story and is more democratic than many neighbouring states who have taken a less social democratic model, instead choosing the disastrous neo-liberal shock therapy route. For some reason the latter states were not tarred with the same brush by the West…

I’m not saying Belarus is perfect, but we’re only getting one side of the story. A side favourable to a bastardised form of 'democracy', a one were opposition movements are bankrolled from abroad and unfavourable governments’ toppled.

With this in mind see Thursday’s Guardian post by Neil Clark “Democracy shouldn't involve bowing to the west” (in response to Timothy Garton Ash piece linked to in the same post) and the report by the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, “Belarus: Brokeback Revolution” below.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/neil_clark/2006/04/....html
Democracy shouldn't involve bowing to the west

Timothy Garton Ash seems to believe in a very narrow definition of democracy - that of electing pro-west governments.
Neil Clark

It is impossible in a single post to "unpick all the muddled-thinking, inaccuracies and half-truths" that accompanied the claims of Timothy Garton Ash in his piece today. But I'll certainly have a try.

Garton Ash, who seems to regard himself as the supreme arbiter of what constitutes a "free and fair" election, is annoyed that there are those of us on the left who don't share his enthusiasm for American and European Union meddling in other country's democratic processes. He absurdly equates the situation in Belarus, a country whose recent elections were found to be free and fair by a wide number of international observers, including the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, with Egypt, a country which has thousands of political prisoners and which routinely uses torture against political opponents. He tell us he is relaxed about the success of the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovich in the recent Ukraine elections, but one wonders if he, or the west, would have been quite so sanguine had Yanukovich not dropped his opposition to Ukraine's EU membership. Given Garton Ash's reaction to other democratic elections in which anti-EU and anti-NATO candidates have been elected, we must have serious doubts......

http://www.bhhrg.org/CountryReport.asp?ChapterID=810&Co...word=

Belarus: Brokeback Revolution

Why did voters in Belarus reject the "Denim Revolution"?

….Over the last 15 years, the Western-controlled OSCE observer missions have swallowed without demur a 97% victory for the “rose revolutionary” Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia in 2004 or a modest 89% from Kyrgyzstan’s “tulip revolutionary” Kurmanbek Bakiev, or 92% for Georgia’s Eduard Shevardnadze back in 1992 when he was still Washington’s favourite reformer, or even Heydar Aliev’s 93% in Azerbaijan in 1993. Yet the same team which never raised an eyebrow about elections where one regime insider was endorsed as the successor of a predecessor whom the West had tired of could not conceive that 82% of Belarussians voted for Alexander Lukashenko.

The West, the EU in particular, threw its weight behind the candidature of Alexander Milinkevich, a little known former academic of Polish extraction, inviting him to Brussels in the pre-election period to be officially endorsed. 2 other opposition candidates were ignored by this august body. However, any candidate who stood on the West’s familiar reform platform of privatization of both industry and public services was going to have an uphill struggle in Belarus where life has improved over the past ten years under Lukashenko led governments. A workable, social democratic model of the type once favoured by the EU now flourishes in Belarus where everyone is all too familiar with the costs of the reform agenda that has ravaged other post-Soviet republics…...

Belarus: Brokeback Revolution_cont

Belarus Today: Evolution versus Market-Fundamentalism

“The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.”
Lewis Carroll[1]

http://www.bhhrg.org/CountryReport.asp?ChapterID=811&Co...word=

Shock therapy has produced the greatest peacetime man-made social and economic disaster since Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture in those ex-Communist countries which adopted the siren schemes proposed by Jeffrey Sachs et al. of the Harvard school. Yet, instead of rewarding Alexander Lukashenko’s instinctive revulsion for inflicting penury on his people to benefit a small class of nouveaux riches emerging from the Communist nomenklatura and their Western partners, the West has poured forth venom on the regime in Belarus which refused to rob its own pensioners and sell its daughters into prostitution or send its graduates to be plumbers in the West.

Visitors to Belarus find a rather different place from the official image of a Stalinist throwback. In fact, there is a massive gulf between the Western media portrait of a country of huddled, impoverished masses and the reality of a society which has seen steadily improving living standards since the last presidential elections in 2001.….

….One Belgian journalist with excellent Russian and experience all over the old Soviet Union admitted to hearing something unique in Belarus: People told him life is better now than it was in Soviet times! Only in Belarus have they stopped looking back nostalgically to Comrade Brezhnev – and that is intolerable to Western shock therapy fundamentalists who insist there can be no alternative to their one true path to capitalism…..

….By rejecting a pseudo-Maoist “Great Leap Forward” to capitalism, Lukashenko saved his people from the tragic impoverishment and demeaning struggle for mere survival inflicted on their neighbours. In the weeks before the presidential election Belarusian State television’s documentary series “15” examined the grim economic history of the other post-Soviet republics and must have reinforced what ordinary Belarussians suspected when comparing the misery and rising mortality rates elsewhere with their own fate: There but for whom they elected in 1994 went them…..
…Migration and Asylum: Who’s fleeing whom?

Unlike its neighbours in Eastern Europe, including the new EU members, Belarus has sent neither a significant number of asylum seekers nor migrants to Britain and other EU states. Whereas Poland, the most aggressive defender of human rights in Belarus in the EU has more than twenty times the number of exiles in Britain than similar would-be asylum seekers from Belarus! Unemployment and poverty in Poland have caused 300,000 Poles to seek economic refuge in the British Isles. Ireland, for instance, has seen growing tension between Irish low-paid workers and the wave of Baltic and Polish migrants. Irish employers are discarding native labour for these ultra-low wage and socially unprotected helots from poverty-stricken Latvia and Lithuania in particular…..

{the final paragraph above should be of interest to the immigration fixated posters here…}

Also see,

Belarus Today: Evolution versus Market-Fundamentalism

Sentence first – verdict afterwards
http://www.bhhrg.org/CountryReport.asp?ChapterID=816&Co...yword

…. For example, Dan Fried assured journalists that the 26th March Ukrainian parliamentary elections would be “free and fair”. However, confidence may not be boosted by the fact that the chief OSCE election observer there is the former Polish spy chief, Marek Siwiec, who assured us there is “no evidence… of vote-rigging” before the polls opened let alone closed with the count completed!1[5]….

….. Take the lead Western election observer, the US Congressman, Alcee Hastings. His condemnations of the elections in Belarus were reported ad nauseam but no Western media added that Mr. Hastings rejoices in the distinction of being only the sixth judge in US history to be impeached and removed from office by the Senate.

Imagine if Mr. Hastings’s criticisms of the polls in Belarus had been introduced every time with reference to his disgrace as a judge removed from the bench for 17 “high crimes and misdemeanours” including soliciting a UJS$150,000 bribe. Why isn’t his full biography on the OSCE website so that Belarussians with access to the web (2 million plus of them) could judge the man judging them? His Wikipedia entry says, “In 1989, Hastings was impeached by the United States House of Representatives for corruption and perjury, and subsequently became only the sixth Judge in the history of impeachment in the United States to be removed from office by the United States Senate.”2[8]

Conservative American pundits denounced the involvement of a Hastings-led OSCE team in their own elections in 2004: “There is no way the OSCE can be unbiased observers,” charged American Policy Center President Tom DeWeese. “…Inviting the likes of Alcee Hastings and his comrades at the OSCE to hover over Americans at the polls this November is unconscionable.” Mr DeWeese added, “Given his history of personal and political paybacks, not to mention the fact that he’s currently under investigation for electoral shenanigans, Alcee Hastings and the OSCE are poised to smear Florida’s vote tally if it’s not to their liking.”

http://www.bhhrg.org/about.asp

You cannot be serious
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,174044....html

Democracy, Henry Ford-style
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/neil_clark/2006/03/....html

….Henry Ford once said that customers could have any colour car they liked so long as it was black.
New world order democracy says voters can vote for any governments they like so long as they are neo-liberal and pro-American….