Belarus: NATO's next target?
By John
Catalinotto
Flushed with their success in removing Slobodan Milosevic
from the presidency of Yugoslavia, the NATO powers moved on
quickly to begin to undermine another country further to the
east. Their media also began to compare Milosevic with that
country's leader.
The target this time was Belarus and especially its
president, Alexander Lukashenko. Belarus, a country of 10
million people that until 1991 was part of the USSR, had
scheduled parliamentary elections for Oct. 15.
According to the official results, slightly over 60
percent of the people voted in this election. Fifty percent
were needed to make it valid. Those elected were largely
supporters of Lukashenko and his policies, which Washington
calls "authoritarian."
There were 574 candidates competing for 110 seats.
Lukashenko's opposition, like the opposition in
Yugoslavia, denounced the elections as rigged and claimed
only 45 percent of the people voted. Washington and other
Western governments refused to observe the elections but
declared them fraudulent anyway.
Why does Washington want to get rid of Lukashenko? On a
visit to Cuba in early September, Lukashenko praised Cuban
President Fidel Castro, calling him "a legendary figure" and
saying "his life is a political manual for any politician in
the world." He added that he and the Cuban leader shared
"exactly the same points of view" on world issues. This alone
would anger U.S. leaders.
Belarus has always been grateful for Cuba's aid to those
made ill by the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl.
Washington also wants to open up Belarus to the
International Monetary Fund, NATO and the transnational
monopolies. The Belarus opposition shares that goal.
Along with opposing the U.S. internationally, Lukashenko
has pushed completely different internal policies from those
in other East European countries.
Conditions differ from rest of East Europe
Wolfgang Richter, the head of the Society for the
Protection of Civil and Human Rights in Germany, was in
Belarus during the Oct. 15 election. Richter was observing
for his organization, not the German government.
In a report published in the German daily newspaper Junge
Welt on Oct. 21, Richter gave a view of life in Belarus that
contrasted sharply with that in many of the other former
socialist countries.
Richter remembered his bitter experiences in Moscow,
Sofia, Bulgaria, and Bucharest, Romania, and had to ask if
there was hunger in Belarus too. People laughed out loud that
he could even suggest it, he wrote. And there was almost no
unemployment. Only 1.7 percent of the people were registered
as jobless, while 2.6 percent of jobs were without
workers.
Living standards were low, Richter recounted, and so was
the amount paid retired people for pensions. But it seemed
everyone got enough to live on and was dressed well. There
were not the great differences between rich and poor seen in
capitalist Russia, Bulgaria and Romania. And even if pensions
and salaries were small, they were paid each month, not held
back for months and years as in those countries.
Education through university was still free, and students
received stipends to live. Cultural events were still
low-priced, with "one-third of the seats at the concert
filled with young people," wrote Richter.
$15 billion left country
In the first few years after the counter-revolution in the
USSR, up until 1994, capitalism had free reign in Belarus.
More than $15 billion left the country, which was on the
verge of civil war.
Then Lukashenko was elected president, and parliament
passed a whole new set of laws.
Richter mentions that the German corporate press--Der
Spiegel, the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung and others--were
already denouncing the Belarus elections just as they had the
elections in Yugoslavia. Richter was an observer at both
elections and found them both held by normal rules.
What's the population's view of Lukashenko? "For the
people who we spoke to," wrote Richter, "his name stood for
the effort to get social security for the population, for a
stable economic and political development, against
corruption, for strengthening the union with Russia and for
the struggle against NATO's expansion to the East."
Perhaps that's why Washington and Berlin want to demonize
Lukashenko and undermine Belarus.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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