Abstract
Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko is nothing if not shrewd. Loathed in the West for maintaining what is generally considered the last dictatorship in Europe (Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once referred to Belarus as an “outpost of tyranny”), Lukashenko watched the recent revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia with keen interest, fearing similar unrest at home.
Last March, he became convinced the West had found its fulcrum in the Union of Poles (SPB), an organization that represents Belarus's Polish minority. When the group replaced its Lukashenko-friendly chairman with a new leader endorsed by both the Belarusian opposition and the Polish government, Lukashenko got proactive. He quickly squelched this small measure of dissent by muzzling the press and initiating a number of petty geopolitical maneuvers. The ensuing diplomatic row revealed the limitations of attempting to promote reform in a region where Russia still wields considerable influence.
The tenuous borders formed after World War II left 400,000 ethnic Poles in Belarus and 300,000 ethnic Belarusians in Poland–although throughout history, Poland and Belarus's exact borders have been revised on many occasions. The nearly 20-year-old SPB deals primarily with cultural and educational activities, which were outlawed among ethnic Poles during the Soviet era. Tadeusz Gawin, SPB's founder and chairman for more than a decade, avoided political issues but was perceived by Belarusian authorities as an opposition sympathizer. In 2000, he was replaced by Tadeusz Kruczkowski, a staunch Lukashenko loyalist.
Kruczkowski's springtime ouster made Lukashenko nervous. He claimed Polish diplomats were stirring up the Polish minority, working through the SPB and Roman Catholic Church in Belarus to destabilize the country. He refused to recognize the new SPB congress or its leader Anzhelika Borys, a schoolteacher from Hrodna, a city heavily populated with ethnic Poles in western Belarus.
So started a summer-long tit for tat, where Minsk and Warsaw engaged in several rounds of reciprocal diplomatic expulsions. Simultaneously, Minsk upped its pressure on the SPB inside Belarus. A printing plant in Hrodna refused to print the Polish-language SPB weekly newspaper edited by a staff loyal to Borys. Anonymous editors later published several bogus issues carrying materials reflecting Minsk's official stance in the SPB conflict. “It is a de facto nationalization of an independent publication,” says Andrzej Poczobut, a Polish journalist in Belarus. “If you ask my opinion about who's behind this, I'm sure it's the [Belarusian] KGB.”
In July, police evicted Borys and her supporters from the SPB headquarters in Hrodna, reinstalling Kruczkowski. Not to be outdone, Warsaw immediately recalled its Belarusian ambassador. But Poland could do little else. It appealed to the European Union (EU) for help, prompting Brussels to respond with a number of indignant statements, which Lukashenko promptly ignored. EU-imposed travel bans on several Belarusian officials worked no better five years ago after these officials' supposed involvement in the murder of three opposition figures and a journalist. Lukashenko stopped heeding appeals from the “West a decade ago, when he staged a rigged constitutional referendum that gave him near-dictatorial powers and effectively deprived the country's legislature and judiciary of any meaningful functions.
Finally, the Belarusian authorities staged a new congress in August, electing Jozef Lucznik, a 69-year-old retired teacher, as SPB leader. Warsaw claimed Lucznik was installed by Belarusian special services and refused to recognize its decisions or fund SPB's staff.
Poland provides $200,000 worth of aid annually to the SPB. In addition, the Polish Senate has allocated nearly $10 million since 1989 to establish 16 Polish cultural centers and two Polish-language schools in Belarus. In light of Lukashenko's strategy of “nationalization,” it's unclear whether Warsaw will persist in paying for the maintenance of these centers and schools. Poland continues to morally and financially support Borys, recognizing her as the SPB's democratically elected leader. However, in an implicit acceptance of defeat, Warsaw inconspicuously sent its ambassador back to Minsk in October 2005.
This outcome represented a proxy victory for Moscow. Lukashenko is the only leader in the region who remains loyal to Russia. Moscow, therefore, cannot reject the only man who declares that Russia is as dear to him as Belarus. So while the EU dithered, Russia engaged in its own brand of bare-knuckled politics. To wit, at the end of July, during the peak of the “Warsaw-Minsk diplomatic spat, three children of Russian diplomats were beaten by hooligans in Warsaw. Russian President Vladimir Putin termed the beating an “unfriendly” act and demanded an official apology. Soon thereafter, two Polish diplomats and a Polish reporter were mugged in Moscow. The ensuing Moscow-Warsaw squabble seemed to confirm that Putin and Lukashenko were working hand-in-hand to blunt Poland's regional power play.
Looming large: Delegates of the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Forces are dwarfed by the on-screen image of Aleksandr Lukashenko on October 2, 2005.
“Warsaw should have been wiser, but it was deluded by its prominent role in brokering a deal in Ukraine's Orange Revolution in favor of Viktor Yushchenko. Poland saw a similar intervention in Belarus as another step in legitimizing its influence in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. But unlike in Ukraine, there is no popular mandate for change in Belarus. The bulk of the Polish ethnic community in Belarus lives in rural areas, and collective-farm ethnic Poles–like collective-farm Belarusians–are rather supportive of Lukashenko since he protects their wages and pensions.
Still, Lukashenko wasn't about to take any chances. His campaign against the SPB had little to do with ethnic politics and much more to do with his desire to retain full control over Belarus's largest nongovernmental organization (NGO) in order to neutralize a potential hotbed of revolutionary dissent. It's a common Lukashenko strategy. In the past several years, the Belarusian authorities banned more than 100 NGOs, closed dozens of independent publications, and crippled the few surviving democratic-minded newspapers. Under such conditions, it's difficult to imagine that the Belarusian opposition can defeat Lukashenko in this year's presidential election.
As the SPB conflict illustrated, neither Warsaw nor Brussels can thwart Lukashenko, particularly with Moscow watching his back. His fate will ultimately depend on the willingness of the Belarusians themselves to demand reform in the one European nation that remains mired in Soviet-style politics.