Message to EU Meddlers: Hands Off Hungary

"Thirty or 40 years ago, the way that the EU and the IMF are behaving towards Hungary would have been described as a classic example of neo-colonial pressure. Unlike Greece, Hungary is not simply being lectured about the need to sort out its economy - it has also been subjected to a veritable culture war. As far as the EU and the Western media are concerned, the real crime of the Hungarian government is not so much its inept economic strategy as its promotion of cultural and political values that run counter to what is deemed correct in Brussels".

"What the Western media overlooked was that the corrupt Gyurcsany government was complicit in creating the conditions for mass demoralisation and cynicism. It was this EU-backed regime that did much to unravel and damage public life in Hungary".

"Moreover, the Western media overlook the democratic deficit that preceded the Orban regime - namely that the earlier constitution of Hungary lacked any democratic mandate. The pre-Orban constitution was enacted on 20 August 1949 as part of the consolidation of the Moscow-dominated Stalinist regime in Hungary. No one in the EU appears to think it odd that an undemocratically enacted constitution imposed on Hungary by a former superpower should be considered morally superior to one based on a democratic mandate.

But then, the EU itself has no inhibitions about imposing its values on to its target audiences. It, too, does not want its constitutional proposals held up to public scrutiny. Sometimes it rules by decree and refuses people’s requests to hold any referenda on EU-related matters, on the basis that the issues are far too complex for ordinary people to understand".

"Opposition to the new constitution, and to the Fidesz regime more broadly, has been both opportunistic and incoherent. A placard on the January demonstration summed up the problem. Written in English, it said: ‘Hey Europe, sorry about my prime minister.’ Clearly, the author of this placard was not addressing the people of Hungary but rather the Western media".

Read the rest of Furedi's brilliant piece here for Spiked Online

Tibor Fischer on Hungary.

Given the shrill chorus of condemnation against Orban orchestrated by liberal left eur0-elites, it has been left to Tibor Fischer-the British writer of Hungarian parentage- to stand up and put the case for Orban, at least as a politician and person when compared to his opponents.

Indeed the opponents now complaining about Orban appear as mere "bad losers" and come off as hardly better and, in fact, mostly, far worse with regards their corruption, control of the media and power hunger.

This is an excerpt from Fischer's Standpoint article back in March 2011 ( A Hungarian Democrat Takes on the Old Guard ),

If someone in Hungary who didn't speak English, who'd never been to Britain, who had made no study of its culture or history were to start fulminating about the state control of the media in the UK (the sinister Ofcom scouring television channels for "offensive" material at the state's behest), we'd laugh or feel sorrow at such patent lunacy. Yet that's precisely the sort of absurd and uninformed criticism that Orbán and his party Fidesz have faced.

Every country has regulation of the media and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, contained in Hungary's media law that isn't found in other EU countries or the US. Lord Annan's sparkling line that the authorities should "censure but not censor" is the ideal a democracy should work towards, but how do you achieve that? Even in Britain with a long tradition of unfettered news and opinion, we still have arguments about exactly where lines should be drawn (and who should be drawing them).

I'll take as my text the Guardian's coverage of this matter, not because I think it especially objectionable, but because it demonstrates the misjudgments that have abounded around the media law and Viktor Orbán in particular.

The Guardian calls Viktor Orbán "power-hungry". There are very few politicians anywhere who aren't. That's the whole aim of politics. Are Cameron, Clegg, Miliband, Obama and Merkel not "power-hungry"? Are footballers reproached for having an unnatural interest in scoring goals?

Then a Guardian editorial (one hopes a little tongue in cheek) had as its title "Hungary: one-party rule". Orbán and Fidesz won the elections last April with 67.88 per cent of the parliamentary seats. Think about that. That's a result that's almost impossible to achieve in a democracy: more than two-thirds of the parliament.

More than half the voters (52.93 per cent) chose Orbán (and there were plenty of other parties to go for — including my favourite, the Two-Tailed Dog Party). That's almost embarrassing in a free election. That's a result that Cameron and Merkel, who barely scraped into power, would cut a limb off for. Think of the "mandate" that confers on you. Is it in the Guardian's view a crime to be popular and successful? Orbán sportingly offered his crushed opponents more seats on parliamentary committees than they were entitled to, but of course his generosity and democratic gesture have gone unrecognised.

Orbán is also styled "a right-wing populist" by the Guardian. Orbán isn't even really right-wing. Like many other anti-communists, merely because of his opposition to a totalitarian system he has been smeared as being far-right or anti-Semitic. Orbán's outlook is more Labour than Conservative (consider his rejection of IMF austerity), but because politicians and journalists in the West can only think in narrow terms of Left and Right, he is placed in that box.

The Guardian reported that the "leading daily newspaper" Népszabadság had as the headline on its front page, "The freedom of the press in Hungary comes to an end". That's accurate reporting, but the Guardian overlooked significant facts. Népszabadság is the leading daily because it was the newspaper of the Communist Party (MSZMP)and it remains the mouthpiece for the Socialist Party (the home of the ex-communists, the oligarchy that still owns and controls most of Hungary from the comfort of the Buda Hills). Népszabadság was the paper that cheered the execution of Hungarians who wanted democracy and free speech, so for it to act as a champion of free speech is like someone from the SS running a workshop on human rights.

Orbán's concern about the Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring countries (where they have been very badly treated) is also interpreted by the Guardian as another manifestation of evil. Curiously, if you're an Arab or a Muslim anywhere in the world you're apparently entirely justified to be aggrieved about the plight of the Palestinians. The Irish are entitled to issue passports to those born in Northern Ireland, but Orbán's notion of giving citizenship to Hungarians three feet on the other side of the border is destabilising Europe.

There is a curious double standard in both politics and the media. If you've been involved at any time with the far-Right, you're a pariah, an odious sicko, no matter how much you recant, but it's OK to play far-Left (one only has to look at the number of British ministers who started off as communists, or the spectacle of Tony Blair campaigning for the ex-Communists in Hungary). One other thing hasn't been considered in the hoo-haa around the media law: the idea that the media in Hungary might need reform.

Hungary had free elections in April 1990 and the communists were out of government. They weren't out of the media. The same people who had been singing about how happy Lenin's birthday made them were still in the television, the radio and the press.

Orbán is the democrat. He risked his neck for democracy — that's more than most of us have done.

Return to Central Europe.

This blog will resume again in the New Year 2012. At this moment I'm writing a book that I hope will be accepted by a publisher next year. The working title is Pipeline War: The Truth and Reality Behind the Conflict in Afghanistan.

Different Blog, A New Emphasis.

This blog will not be updated for some time. Though still interested in Central and Eastern Europe, I'm now focusing a lot more on the New Great Game in Central Asia, the prospect of resource wars, Peak Oil, the interconnections between British and US foreign policy and the pursuit of secure oil supplies.

This and the emergence of Islamist movements in the West that seek to use the threat of violence in order to empower Muslims through positing an Islamic hyper identity that will force change in places such as Britain and the possibility this could have, when faced with the collapse of Western control over the Middle East, into intractable conflicts.

My contention is that the British government wants to use that threat in order to advance its foreign policy all the more from Libya to Iraq and Afghanistan as part of "Democratic Geopolitics" which has as its ostensible aim the "war on terrorism" but which is more concerned with using this as a pretext to secure oil supplies.

That and other topics as well.

http://karl-naylor.blogspot.com/

"The New Cold War"-The Opinion of Peter Hitchens.

Peter Hitchens in his latest work, The Broken Compass ( re-issued as The Cameron Delusion 2010 ), wrote scathingly of the new consensus in politics and diplomacy in Britain as regards the survival of NATO and it's expansion ( preface viii ),

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, bizarrely, continues to exist despite the complete disappearance of the Soviet opponent is was meant to deter.

When Russia recently threatened Georgia, battalions of commentators and politicians in what is still, for lack of a better term, called the West behaved as if this squalid and unimportant territorial squabble between unlovable governments was comparable to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia forty years before.

Yet it was wholly different. Russia is no longer an ideological state, externally or internally. It no longer seeks global power and in some ways is less interested in the minds of its citizens than are 'Western' countries which demand increasing obedience to the formulas of political correctness. In Russia, you may hold what private opinions you like. Just do not challenge the state. In Britain your private opinions may be reported to the authorities and get you into trouble, even if you believe your actions are part of normal life and you have no wish to challenge the state

The paradox is one of the most alarming facts about the modern world, and is unfortunately too little understood. This is because of the growing conventional wisdom of a 'New Cold War' is taking place between tyrannical Russia and free Britain. This is untrue and pernicious. The invented threat abroad is used to justify a stronger state at home.

Discuss.

Belarus Compared with Latvia

Here is an interesting perspective on Belarus and Latvia offered by US economists Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Summers-The Myth of the Baltic Tigers, The Death of "Social Europe"-which is critical of the doctrinaire IMF neoliberal model imposed upon it in past years.

The standard mantra (as recently rolled out in The Economist) is that Latvia’s taciturn and honest prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis, won re-election in October even after imposing the harshest tax and austerity policies ever adopted during peacetime, because the “mature” electorate realized this was necessary, “defying conventional wisdom” by voting in an austerity government.

What is interesting is how politics in Latvia is divided on the basis of ethnicity and how populist nationalism has dovetailed with the imposition of neoliberal economics, whereby the nationalists are a symptom of the disease of which they pretend to be the cure.

Moreover, after the economic collapse of 2009, many Latvians decided to be apathetic or follow large numbers of angry Poles in repudiating their nation and voting with their feet to go and work and live in the West. One more consequence of the mantra of 'There is No Alternative' .

While the economic crisis was deep enough to drive even Latvia’s depoliticized population into the streets in the winter of 2009, most Latvians soon after found the path of least resistance to be simply to emigrate. Neoliberal austerity has created demographic losses exceeding Stalin’s deportations back in the 1940s (although without the latter’s loss of life). As government cutbacks in education, health care and other basic social infrastructure threaten to undercut long-term development, young people are emigrating rather than to suffer in an economy without jobs. Over 12 per cent of the overall population (and a much larger percentage of its labor force) now works abroad.

A land with hardly more than a million people lost 100,000 of its youngest and most ambitious to emigration after EU accession, almost half of them to Ireland. The Latvian government then toyed with importing workers from Ghana.

This is a fact never mentioned by those Euro-Atlanticists such as Timothy Garton Ash as such facts are subversive but some facts are more subversive than others, not least if the facts are used to prove the prescriptions of an Atlanticist narrative of neoliberalism and "People Power".

One Latvian one remarked that "During the Cold War we all dreamed of leaving but the risk is that everyone leaves, then the country will disappear". Hudson and Summers compare that with performance with Belarus whilst offering no rationalisation for authoritarian rule.

Given the geographic proximity of Latvia and Belarus, it is illuminating to compare how neoliberals have assessed their respective economies. Latvia suffered Europe’s largest economic collapse in 2008 and 2009, with continuing double-digit unemployment. Its economy will show no growth until this year (2011), and its modest growth likely will remain accompanied by double-digit unemployment. A huge slice of its population has evacuated the country, leaving many children with relatives or to fend for themselves. Neighboring Belarus, with few of Latvia’s geographic advantages (ports and beaches), has a per capital GDP not too far behind Latvia’s. Belarus had a boom with double-digit growth before the crisis, and kept its economy at full employment during the crisis rather than collapsing by the 25 per cent rate that plagued Latvia. Belarus also has a GINI coefficient (inequality) roughly on par with Sweden, while Latvia’s is closer to the widening inequality levels that now characterize the United States.

Yet neoliberal Latvia is declared a success model and Belarus a failure. The CIA’s World Factbook reminds its readers that Belarus’s economic performance occurred “despite the roadblocks of a tough, centrally directed economy.” This is the standard characterization of Belarus. But one needs to ask to what degree its success may reflect its central planning. Latvia has produced greater political freedom for dissidents, but Belarus has less economic inequality and foreign debt.

Every economy in history has been a mixed economy. We are not defending Comrade Lukashenko’s media and political repression in Belarus. We simply are not going to the opposite extreme of applauding Latvia’s neoliberal model. One can criticize Belarus’ political system without endorsing the electoral oligarchy that characterizes much of Latvia’s political life. Yet win or lose on economic outcomes, in the western press and academies Latvia and the Starving Baltic Tigers will be declared the winners, while Belarus always will be declared the loser on economic performance, regardless of achievement. You will not see a measured look at both nations’ economies to examine objectively where they are succeeding and failing (including by sector) with an eye for what lessons might be derived from such an investigation. Economic comparisons are entirely political.

Our intention is not to blame the Latvian nation for the cruel neoliberal policy experiment to which it has been subjected, to question the global community of policymakers, intellectuals and some of Latvia’s own elites that persist in pursuing this failed policy and even recommend it to other countries as a path of growth rather than economic and demographic suicide.

Perhaps one day those such as Garton Ash can start to deal with the stark and depressing reality of undemocratic IMF "reforms" and the mantra of There is No Alternative, as it is one that has vastly diminished the People Power creed he continually advocates.

The Best Democratic Opposition Money can Buy in Russia.

The problem with liberals lecturing Russia about the repressive measures used by Putin to disperse demonstrations is that Putin has been able to do so because few in Russia actually care about the Western backed "opposition", many of whom consistently backed a Yeltsin regime that had an appalling record on human rights in the 1990s.

Simon Tisdall writes in the Guardian today,,

The jailing of several leading opposition figures, including former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, has hammered another large nail into the coffin of free expression in Russia, human rights activists and foreign observers say.

Many Western media outlets only seem to be interested in human rights when that means the human rights of those such as Nemtsov who as Mayor of Nizhinii Novgorod and fanatical supporter of Chubais "shock therapy" plunged millions of Russians into starvation and appalling poverty whilst looting the economy.

These oligarchs are no less ruthless that Putin's new Russian state. The reason their cause is supported by those such as Edward Lucas ( "The New Cold War" ) and Simon Tisdall is that the wrong oligarchs are in power in Russia. Tisdall writes,

Anxious perhaps to dispel any impression he was abashed by the Khodorkovsky uproar, Putin sent in the heavies. Nemtsov was arrested and jailed for 15 days for "disobeying police". Three other opposition leaders – Eduard Limonov, Konstantin Kosyakin and Ilya Yashin – were also incarcerated.

There is no mention, of course, that Limonov is explicitly a Fascist who has run a movement named "The National Bolsheviks" that uses explicit Nazi and Soviet insignia and Fascist policies and threatening mob demonstrations.

There is a difference between the idea that people ought to have freedom of assembly and protest and the notion that those complaining about being restricted in their protests by having to get permission from the Kremlin are necessarily virtuous martyrs for democracy.

It is about time serious consideration was given to the way monied oligarchs and those able to project media power are able to use human rights cynically as a way of gaining influence and possibly power by exploiting the shortcomings of the current regime.

To support Nemstov and Limanov is about as much of an "ethical foreign policy" as the West supporting somebody such as Pinochet had Allende's government resorted to the repression of opponents to secure power and Pinochet had then cited human rights as a reason he should gain power.

The opposition is funded by US NGO's in a way that simply would not be tolerated in Washington on the scale it is in Russia. Russians both the new emerging middle class and the workers and peasants are not going to be lectured by Washington think tanks, "The Other Russia" or Garry Kasparov.

To promote liberal democracy in Russia means neither supporting Putin nor the opposition which is full of those ruthless ideologues who were discredited by being part of a regime under Yeltsin that forcibly closed down the Duma in 1993, shelled the building and used military force to kill demonstrators.

Western liberals need to understand how and why Putin has been able to secure power and why he is popular compared to those like Nemtsov whose Union of Rightist Forces are detested. Citing anti-semitism ( Khodorkovsky and Nemtsov are Jewish) is an evasion and does not provide the deeper reason.

For the fact is that Putin's managed democracy, whatever people think about it in the West, has delivered better living standards and has not dispersed protesters with guns, tanks and helicopters. Nemstov has been put in prison for 15 days for leading that protest, something that will make Putin popular.

The "liberal" opposition in Russia was anything but when shock therapists such as Gaidar and Chumais and Nemtsov ruled Russia. Neoliberal policies led to a collapse in living standards whilst billions enriched the oligarchs who siphoned off wealth no less than Western businesses.

The hypocrisy of those such as Lucas and Tisdall is gliding over the sordidness of the "transition" remains an obstacle to convincing many in Russia that a strong state that will protect the country from Western energy and banking corporations and mafia style oligarchs controlling it again.

The reason the energy hungry West continually supports those such as Yabloko, the Union of Rightist Forces and neoliberal shock therapy fanatics as it would ideally aim at breaking up Gazprom, to gain a stake in Russia's vast oil and gas reserves and destroy Russia as a global player.

There is no possible way that Russia would ever allow that to happen again and so the support for those as Limanov and Nemstov is not only unethical as a foreign policy but also completely unrealistic. Putin would not care less if David Cameron snubbed him or lectured him about human rights or the war with Georgia in 2008 ( which Georgia initiated ).

More broadly, there is however something increasingly ominous about how in East and West democracy is becoming controlled by the money and media power of corporations, plutocrats and oligarchs. In that sense, it seems Russia, EU states and the USA are increasingly learning from one another.

Supporting freedom of conscience and assembly is right as both are essential human rights. For that Putin has been rightly criticised. Yet it should not follow that Western figures should see the repression of certain oppositionists as proof that the oppositionists are thus rightful democracy lovers.

That would be as absurd as pretending that the Bolsheviks just because they were against the Tsar, were necessarily better due the repressive nature of Tsarism and the Okhrana. The same should apply to neoliberal Market Bolsheviks.

Increasingly oppositionists in less developed nations in post-Soviet nations are becoming only "the best democracy that money can buy" and where the considerations of ordinary people are passed over in greedy and rapacious elite struggles.

Failed People Power. 2006 Repeated in Belarus.

With the protests over the elections in Minsk having achieved little, one of the most incisive commentaries written on Belarus in 2006 at the time of the abortive "Denim Revolution" was by Jonathan Steele who did not denigrate the opposition but provided an objective analysis about why its not that popular ( Europe and the US decide the winner before the vote, The Guardian, Friday 10 March 2006 )

Would you expect a European leader who has presided over a continual increase in real wages for several years, culminating in a 24% rise over the past 12 months, to be voted out of office? What if he has also cut VAT, brought down inflation, halved the number of people in poverty in the past seven years, and avoided social tensions by maintaining the fairest distribution of incomes of any country in the region?

Of course not, you would say. In Bill Clinton's famous phrase, "it's the economy, stupid". Unless there are overriding issues of political or personal insecurity - incipient civil war, ethnic cleansing, mass arrests, pervasive crime on the streets - most people will vote according to their pocketbooks. And so it is likely to be in Belarus in nine days' time.

Why, then, are western governments, echoed by most western media, developing a crescendo of one-sided reporting and comment on one of Europe's smallest countries? Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, last year called it an "outpost of tyranny". Stephen Hadley, the US national security adviser, recently complained that "there is not enough outrage and international attention on Belarus". As if on cue, we now have thundering editorials and loaded reports in America and Europe claiming the imminent election is a farce and the regime deeply unpopular.

We saw similar conformism little more than a year ago in Ukraine, when one side was glorified to the skies, as if only a tiny minority of benighted Sovietera automatons did not support the pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. His opponent actually got 44% of the vote, and may even emerge with the highest number of votes in Ukraine's parliamentary elections in two weeks.

In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko is certainly no liberal. He manipulates state television; he bans distribution of critical newspapers from state-owned kiosks (which are the majority), and often has those that are printed abroad confiscated at the border; he makes it hard for opposition parties to hold rallies; and he uses the police in a partisan and frequently brutal way. Students fear expulsion and government employees the sack if they join protests.

This was already true in 1996 when I monitored a constitutional referendum on behalf of the European Institute for the Media and reported that the electoral climate was neither free nor fair. At that stage Lukashenko had only been in power for two years. An authoritarian populist and control freak then, he has remained true to form (not, however, a communist; Belarus has two communist parties, one of which is illegal).

The change is in the economy. Like other former Soviet republics, Belarus suffered a massive collapse after 1991, with output dropping by more than half thanks to "shock therapy" reforms. But in 12 years of power Lukashenko has righted that, as my opening statistics show (all taken from the IMF's country report on Belarus in June 2005).

I haven't been in Belarus for 10 years, but residents I speak to on the phone, as well as western visitors, report that most people are satisfied with their living standards. Many have family or other ties to Russia, their giant neighbour, and feel grateful for the stability, moderation and absence of an oligarch-dominated economy that Belarus enjoys.

Contrary to claims that Lukashenko's repression has produced an "information black hole", the choice of news is wider than in 1996. The EU-funded EuroNews channel is available on cable, which millions of people have, and access to uncensored websites is easy in internet clubs and cafes or at home.

Despite this, there is a huge campaign by foreign governments to intervene in the Belarussian poll, even more controversially than in Ukraine in 2004. While Russia is hardly engaged in this election, Europe and the US are pumping in money. According to the New York Times, cash is being smuggled from the US National Endowment for Democracy, Britain's Westminster Foundation and the German foreign ministry directly to Khopits, a network of young anti-Lukashenko activists.

Poland has reopened a state-owned radio station on its eastern border to beam programmes across Belarus, while the German government's Deutsche Welle started broadcasts to Belarus this year. Alexander Milinkevich, the main opposition candidate, has been touring European capitals and getting endorsements that amount to blatant interference in a foreign electoral contest.

Some of this foreign money will be used to fund street protests promised by opposition activists if Lukashenko is declared the winner. They have already dubbed it the "denim revolution", giving supporters little bits of the cloth as symbols to copy the successful demonstrations in Ukraine and Georgia.

But why is the US, with the EU in its wake, so concerned about Belarus? Is it because Belarus stands out as the only ex-Soviet country that maintains majority state ownership of the economy and gets good results? Is ideological deviance forbidden? (The IMF, while admitting Lukashenko's economic success, calls it "ultimately unsustainable", being based on cheap Russian energy imports and wage increases that outstrip productivity growth.) Is the problem Lukashenko's independence, his friendliness to Russia and resistance to Nato, his abrasive, don't-push-me-around style? As one Minsk resident put it to me, he's a "Slavic Castro".

The revolt against Lukashenko within Belarus is genuine, idealistic and, in some cases, courageous. As in the rest of eastern Europe, nationalist intellectuals and the urban elite, particularly in the capital, include many who want change and feel the rewards are worth the risk. They want the west's moral support and its freedom, as well as its money. But they are not the majority. A poll in January by Gallup/Baltic Surveys, and reported in the emigre Belarusian Review, found only 17% in favour of Milinkevich and nearly 55% supporting Lukashenko.

Western funders claim their motives are innocent, with help offered merely to develop "democracy" and "European values". In that case they should insist that the groups and the media they aid in Belarus are fair, accurate and intelligent, rather than one-sided demonisers of their opponents, mirroring Lukashenko's approach. But when western media, despite their vaunted objectivity and years of democratic experience, also report on Belarus in a way that is narrow and partisan, this is asking a lot.

Lukashenko and "The Chinese Model".

One reason why Lukashenko was able to claim a 79% re-election victory and ignore the EU's demands for a free and fair election, even though he was offered $3bn by Polish and German ministers if he did not tamper with election results, is said to have been the deal he made with Russia,

Europe's Mugabe only dared to act in this way because, 10 days before the election, he unexpectedly secured a deal with Russia. This once again gives him subsidised oil, which he can sell on at a profit. For his part, he agreed the terms of a "single economic space" with Russia and Kazakhstan.

Before that, the boot had been on the other foot. Russia seemed to have had enough of Lukashenko: a Russian TV channel owned by Gazprom even aired a four-part series attacking him as a corrupt godfather.

Yet an interesting perspective was offered today by the Financial Times which claims that economic liberalisation will happen in Belarus in 2011, one reason perhaps why despite condemnations there is not much more from the West and why Lukashenko has been able to clamp down on what he calls "senseless democracy".

Alesia Sidliarevich writes (Belarus’ Lukashenko re-election roils but economic liberalisation key to future )

According to preliminary results announced by Belarusian authorities, Lukashenko gained 79.68% of votes at the presidential elections on Sunday. Thousands-strong protests gathered in Minsk that evening to contest the ballot result, prompting a brutal police response and detention of seven presidential candidates from opposition, according to international media reports.

Few doubt however that Lukashenko will retain the presidency and in doing so extend his 16-year rule until 2015. His major challenge then will be to liberalise the Belarusian economy and draw in foreign investment by kick-starting a stalled privatisation programme.

Welcoming foreigners

Economic conditions in the landlocked Eastern European country bordering Russia have slowly improved following the government’s decision to fully draw down a USD 3.6bn standby loan from the IMF last year. The country is projected to shrink its current account deficit from 13% in 2009 to 9.7% this year. Nevertheless, it has needed to venture into the international capital markets to bolster reserves.

On the subject of national debts the FT reported a fairly rosy economic picture in some ways compared to the notion that Belarus is some version of Zimbabwe or North Korea.

Belarus does not have any major short-term debt repayments to make, with its first major redemption of USD 2.5bn due in 2013, according to Siargey Chaly, a Minsk-based economist. The country’s foreign debt, which consists mainly of inter-governmental agreements, is quite cheap and pays an average of 300bps over Libor, he said.

Privatizing state enterprises through competitive tenders should bring more benefits to the government than direct sale negotiations, said Giovanni Salvetti, Rothschild‘s managing director overseeing Central and Eastern Europe. “If privatisation is handled in a ‘Western’ way [via competitive tenders] I would expect significant interest from foreign investors in certain sectors,” he added.

High stakes

But privatisation will be a painful process without measures to create additional jobs and a more liberal economic climate, said Ramanchuk. “The Belarusian economic situation mirrors the Soviet Union in the year 1985,” he added, noting that one of the chief points of his election programme was support for small and medium-sized businesses.

Lukashenko has held back from unpopular moves to privatize state enterprises until after the election, but a source close to the Belarusian government said the president will have to re-start plans next year. “Belarusian enterprises are 30%-40% over-employed. Politically speaking, privatisation is a very bad move, but the government does not have a choice. It needs to do it to get foreign funding,” the source said.

Belarus may decide to privatise companies within the financial, construction materials, consumer goods, pharmaceutical and energy sectors, among others, according to Salvetti at Rothschild.

Belgosstrakh, Belinvestbank and Belagroprombank could be up for sale, along with pharmaceutical company Borimed, refinery Naftan Novopolotsk and various cement plants, said the source close to the government. The state would consider full sales, or the disposal of majority or 25% stakes, he added. Belarus also negotiated to sell fertiliser producer Belaruskali to a Chinese buyer at the start of the year but could not agree the price.

This goes some way to explaining why Lukashenko has been able to retain power. He has played off all the global investors against one another. It also proves that there is no necessary correlation between economic liberalisation and democracy as China has proved and why he seems to be aiming at creating a European version of the "Chinese" or "Singaporean" model.

There would be nothing out of character here given that Kazakhstan is allowed to be Chairman of the OSCE despite the fact that it actually criticises the elections there as flawed as well and has a one party state run by Nursultan Nazarbayev one which is far more repressive and more obviously authoritarian than even Belarus. Then again it has copious supplies of oil and gas.

There has been no widespread criticism of Kazakhstan's human rights violations and repression and it has not been publicly referred to in mainstream papers such as The Guardian as being a brutal dictatorship in quite the same way, probably because it lies on the Asian side of Russia.

In fact, in 2009, former UK cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken released a biography of the Kazakhstani leader entitled Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan. The book takes a generally pro-Nazarbayev stance, asserting in the introduction that he is mostly responsible for the success of modern Kazakhstan.

Lukashenko has learnt the lesson that it is possible to use force to deal with protesters as there is nothing even the EU will be prepared to do if he can stave off political challenges, as weak as they are, long enough for him to get the economy booming and investment from privatisations pouring in.

"This Robert Mugabe of Eastern Europe" ?

When youthful photogenic and idealistic youth activists contest the results of what seems a fraudulent election in Belarus on the streets in central Minsk, it seems like bad form to spoil that by asking questions about what the oppositionists stand for beyond getting rid of the authoritarian hardman who has lead the nation since 1994

Timothy Garton Ash has written of the protests following Lukashenko's "re-election" that the Belarussian leader is "Europe's Mugabe" (Belarus may seem a far away country, but we have to confront Europe's Mugabe, Wednesday 22 December 2010 )

"Lukashenko did not need to crack down so brutally to stay in power – as this Robert Mugabe of eastern Europe has done since 1994. Having opened up state television to opposition candidates, and made a show of meeting the EU's demands for a free and fair election, he could have rigged the vote just enough to get back in. He could have let the weak and divided opposition go on protesting for a few days in a freezing Minsk, and then quietly cleared away the remaining protesters from Independence Square while western leaders were celebrating their Christmas.

Why be so brutal? Why rub their faces in it? One answer, which invariably pops up in such circumstances, is divisions within the ruling apparatus. Hardliners got the upper hand. There may be some truth in this; but another, simpler explanation was given to me by Andrey Dynko, editor of the leading Belarussian weekly, Nasha Niva. Lukashenko, reverting to what Dynko calls "Russian autocratic tradition", simply wanted to get the levels of fear back up to a healthy (for the autocrat) level. National fear standards had fallen alarmingly over the last few years of relative liberalisation and opening to the west. Better teach his people a lesson again. National fear must be kept higher than national debt".

Yet what Garton Ash does not mention is that the debts of similar sized Baltic states are colossal too after having had 20 years of IMF adjustment programmes and austerity measures only to develop a nation with lower social provision than in Belarus, ghost villages, mass migration and yet another economic collapse after the 2008 crash.

The fact that Alexander Lukashenko resorted to brute force in getting the police to crush demonstrations in Minsk still does not mean he is a Stalinist dictator. Even without the electoral irregularities or allegations of fraud he would, according to many credible sources, still command a vote in excess of that gained by the various oppositionists.

The reason Lukashenko has remained popular and has continued in office in Belarus lies less in his use of detention without trial for days and harassment techniques, as repellent as they are, but because after he came to power in 1994 he preserved the nation from the chaos and immiseration caused by the IMF's neoliberal "freedom" in Yeltsin's Russia.

As Ben Smith in the Wall Street Journal commented,

For ordinary people in most of the former Soviet Union, the prosperity the West offered them at the end of the Cold War has failed to materialize......the bulk of the population looks to Belarus’s big neighbors to the east and south, Russia and Ukraine. What they see there is chaos.

The fear of change is particularly evident in the countryside, home to about a third of the Belarussian population. In the village of Knjazhitsy in eastern Belarus, everybody has a cousin in Russia, Ukraine or one of Belarus's sister republics in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Knjazhitsy is a village of 460, and there is just one shop. In the Soviet tradition, the shop is called “shop” and it is long on vodka but short on vegetables — on Tuesday, just six aging eggplants. Talking politics in Knjazhitsy means talking about how much worse it could be. The shopkeeper, Lubov Ivanova, left her home in Kazakhstan in 1992 when her factory shut down. She says that she has no regrets, and that her friends back home tell her “they are starving.”

Under Mr. Lukashenko, Belarus has closed none of its massive Soviet era factories, which hemorrhage money and produce generally shoddy equipment. Inefficient collective farms are still growing strong. Private prosperity is rare: The top 10 percent of Belarussian society is just three times richer than the bottom 10 percent, according to United Nations figures. In Russia, the top 10 percent is 23 times richer. In Ukraine, workers are owed hundreds of millions of dollars in wage arrears, and four out of five residents expect to die in poverty, according to the U.N.’s International Labor Office.

In the Belarussian countryside, the anecdotes are more powerful than the statistics. A retired teacher who came to the store to pick up bread says her sister in Ukraine needs to spend her entire pension on gas heat to survive the winter. “When my sister visits [Belarus] she tells me, ‘Take care of your Lukashenko, or else the same thing will happen to you that is happening to us,’” Svetlana Petrova says. She, like most of the people of Knjazhitsy, voted for Lukashenko.

The perception that ordinary people are doing better in Belarus’s stagnant economy than they would in a time of reform is hardly unique to Knjazhitsy. The most recent poll on Belarussians’ perceptions of their neighbors revealed that more than 50 percent of Belarussians think they live better than Ukrainians and only 10 percent say they live worse, the 1999 poll by the Independent Institute for Socio-Political Research in Minsk found.

In the "Denim Revolution" of 2006 Garton Ash was critical of those who he believed invoked the "iron rice bowl" rationalisation for the lack of freedom in Belarus, one that presupposed that this strange remnant of post-Soviet Russia had withheld freedoms for the illusion of economic security that was wretchedly low.

Yet Belarus has an income per head comparable with Bulgaria, Romania and Russia and with the maintenance of relatively good pensions, healthcare and other social provisions. That minimal social safety net is not a sufficient reason for there being no attempt to liberalise the regime in Belarus but it does help explain why he has not met the fate of Ceaucescu.

Freedom is freedom but the real question dodged by those giving full unconditional support to the oppositionists is if and when Lukashenko goes what kind of reforms would be introduced in the economy. For its a fact of realpolitik that Bat'ka plays on that fear of "instability" to gain support.

If the opposition were so popular as Solidarity undoubtedly were in Poland during the 1980s, then it is inconceivable that Lukashenko would be able remain in power or that more than 10,000 demonstrators would not appear to protest. There would be no room even for the "managed" democracy on offer there now.

That has less to do with some constant nightmare climate of fear but with indifference and the belief common in Belarus that the various democracy promotion activists are selfish individuals who care more about getting rid of the so-called "social market state" in order to get a slice of the privatisation pie once he has gone.

Fear of social change, unemployment, a collapse in living standards are not mere "fears of change" but very real. If there were to be beneficial change in Belarus, then the opposition should be more transparent in coming forth with the details of their plans to reform the economy.

There is nothing from Charter97 on this. But the Internet is not banned. Citizens there can find out what is happening in the world, even if there were disruptions to the service up to the election. People in Belarus know about what happened in Russia. The life expectancy for men is 55. In Belarus its 69.

In Poland unemployment rates were stubbornly up to 20% in many parts of the rural areas before mass migration after 2004, a stubborn economic fact of life seldom dwelt on by Garton Ash who has never really had that much critical to say about "shock therapy" once the camera had moved on from the struggle to get rid of Soviet Communism.

The Charter97 movement was modelled on Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia but its has been forgotten that many signatories back then were as scathing of Soviet command systems as they were critical of the USA's form of capitalism, something that seems absent from anything the opposition in Belarus offer.

There is no lack of logical consistency in calling for democratic freedom in Belarus and for accountability from the opposition in Belarus too, more transparency about their plans for reform, their financing, the stance on NATO entry and so on. If they are fearless champions of democracy, they need not fear being open on that.

For as Garton Ash has insisted, it is for the people in Belarus to decide. That would be real People Power and not simply a means of empowering networking activists who will align themselves with global TNCs to to act as consultants in ruthlessly asset stripping Belarus should Lukashenko be removed.

Nothing Garton Ash has written on Belarus has looked at what opposition leaders stand for beyond getting rid of Lukashenko. There have been continual reshuffles and new candidates thrown up over the years before each election. Yet none has reached a global audience as Havel or Walesa did.

There is no charismatic leader emerging from within Belarus and sincere dissidents such as Zianon Pazniak have rejected current oppositionists.

The last candidate with some appeal was supposed to have been Aliaksandr Milinkievič who gave an interview with Euronews in 2008 in which he was given a voice over in English where he said this,

"The most important thing is, apart from repression, in the economy there is no reform. In terms of investment we are the worst in Europe, our economy hasn't been modernised, it's certainly not competitive. We would need two or three years to correct this"

The problem is that, apart from the repression, that is not the truth. Investment has come in from the EU and Russia in the last few years on a scale unprecedented, even under Lukashenko, and if the economy is as bad as Milinkievic states then it would take more than a a couple of years to correct it.

Those with a conscience will not only be thinking of those battered and beaten by a repressive police apparatus but also of those who were shoved brutally into penury by shock therapy in the 1990s and how the economy would be reformed after liberation without handing control over to those who would loot the economy and cause chaos again.

........................................................................

Garton Ash responded "don't you think Belarussians should be free to choose their economic policy, even if they choose 'wrong' from your, and possibly even their point of view?"

The answer is yes. The question is which Belarussians and that should mean not just "some" Belarussians with connections and the networking skills that will allow them to profit as they act as consultants for TNC's asset stripping and robbing the country. Unless those who will be called upon to help get rid of Lukashenko can be rejected after they are no longer useful.

What Garton Ash misses is that there was no majority of people in any nation before 1989 in Central Europe who would have willingly acceded to shock therapy. That is why the opposition need to explain this time, since the last time it had such negative effects, why political freedom should not mean economic improvement as well or, at least, not a large painful deterioration.

Decide their own economic policy is what Belarussians will not be able to do if oppositionists necessarily follow the path of other states such as Latvia and Lithuania and ceding sovereignty in economic matters to Washington and the IMF. Which is why it is incumbent upon the opposition groups to outline their economic plans clearly and openly.

It as though Garton Ash thinks it is cynical to even mention the economic policies that would follow in the wake of a successful "People Power" revolution at a time when those protesting against the more obvious evils of election rigging, though its odd that he has never once mentioned Georgia's election in 2004 in this regard nor Saakashvili's record of repression.

...........................................

"In Belarus we have our own European Burma".

In fact, Belarus would be better compared with Georgia than to nations such as Burma as in Belarus, unlike Burma which has been termed "a textbook example of police state" by Brad Adams, director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, where spies are everywhere, sexual slavery is normal as well as forced labour and systemic rapes carried out by the military.

But it is curious that such comparisons with repressive states backed by the West in the post-Soviet orbit are not made. Not least as Saakashvili is an ally in the geopolitical New Great Game for control of pipelines and the pursuit of power through controlling energy in Central Asia.

Indeed in 2005, Saakashvili was an esteemed guest in Poland for a 25th anniversary commemoration where the leader of Georgia, now severely criticised by human rights groups for his aggression against South Ossetia in the war of 2008 and who was ramping up nationalist passions long before then, was feted.

Gathered to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the birth of Solidarity, the presidents of Georgia and Ukraine, Mikhail Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko, were greeted with standing ovations as they declared that Solidarity's example should inspire democracy activists in Belarus to topple the authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, who expects to be re-elected next year.

Mr Saakashvili and Mr Yushchenko, leaders of "rose" and "orange" revolutions in their countries in the past two years, called for August 31 - the day in 1980 that the communist bloc's first free trade union was born in a Gdansk shipyard - to be declared an international day of freedom and solidarity.

To rousing applause, Mr Saakashvili said that following the Solidarity-led revolutions of 1989, the post-Soviet region was in the throes of "a second wave of liberation of Europe".

"I am sure there will be more. Freedom and democracy will prevail everywhere, including in Belarus".

To have this corrupt kleptocrat and president of a regime based on a fraudulent election in which he got 96% of the vote lecture the world on freedom, including Belarus, makes a farce of the notion of 'People Power revolutions' or "Colour Revolutions" choreographed by those with geopolitical interests in expanding the EU and NATO.

.............................

The obvious problem with 'Colour Revolutions' is that they have become a discredited brand to market to a global audience. Where people see that "regime change" necessarily means poverty and more corruption as in Georgia and Ukraine after the "rose" and "orange" revolutions then they will not buy it.

Kosovo: Ethnic cleansing, Rigged Elections and Organ Trafficking.

"I did what was right. I did what was just. I did not regret it then. I do not regret it now,"-Tony Blair 09 2010

We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So let's start giving
There's a choice we're making
We're saving our own lives
It's true we'll make a better day
Just you and me

Send them your heart
So they'll know that someone cares

( We Are the World-Lyrics )

The reaction to investigations of the head of the KLA para state in Kosovo Hasim Thaci and his Drebenda gang, in being implicated in the sale of human organs from Serbian prisoners of war threatens, to call into question the nature of the Kosovo War in 1999, what Peter Hitchens has termed the "dry run" for the later disaster in Iraq.

Tim Judah, an established journalist and historian of the conflict has written in the Daily Telegraph ( Blair's Kosovo triumph turns sour 19 Dec 2010)

In a report for the Council of Europe which took two years to compile, he has accused Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of newly independent Kosovo, not only of being a mafia boss, a murderer and a drug dealer – but of having been involved with a group that in 1999 killed prisoners to sell their kidneys.

In Kosovo, which was already reeling from allegations that Mr Thaci's party had indulged in what a senior diplomat called "industrial scale" fraud during last Sunday's elections, the report has been greeted with dismay.

At the time the impact of the intervention in Kosovo could be weighted towards the NATO feeling that something needed to be done to bring closure to the Third Balkan Wars, which had been seen to have begun in Kosovo with Milosevic's speech announcing the revival of Greater Serbian nationalism in 1989.

Judah writes that with the 78 day campaign the impact at the time was at best hardly conclusively successful as a "humanitarian intervention",

.....as Serbia capitulated and its police and army pulled out, the boot was on the other foot. As hundreds of thousands of ethnically cleansed Albanian refugees returned, they exacted revenge on the minority Serb enclaves in their own territory, with the KLA playing a leading role.Moreover, Nato troops were effectively told to turn a blind eye to some of what went on.

The rest of Judah's article is here

Today Mr Clinton is immortalised in a bronze statue in Pristina, and last summer Mr Blair was greeted by thousands when he visited. He was also introduced to a group of "Toniblers", boys named in his honour. Hobnobbing with Mr Thaci, it was smiles all round.

If ever it is proved that the KLA leader whom Mr Blair backed was really a mafia boss, a murderer and traded in human organs, then the history of that campaign will have to be rewritten – and the gloss put on it by Mr Blair will vanish.

The most damning of Mr Marty's claims is that a number of Serb and other prisoners who had been moved to Albania in the wake of the war were executed and their organs sold. The claim was first made publicly by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the UN's Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague in a book in 2008. Subsequent investigations have failed to prove the claims, which Mr Thaci says are defamatory.

The EU's police and justice mission in Kosovo, known as EULEX, has also looked at the case of the so-called "Yellow house" in Albania where some of the organ-harvesting operations are said to have taken place. But unlike Mr Marty, it notes that "to date, our prosecutors have found no evidence or intelligence that would lead us to believe that 'organ harvesting' took place at this location."

There are, however, other allegations that are very real and very current. A courthouse in Pristina heard last week how seven Kosovars were part of an elaborate international "organs for cash" network, in which donors from poor countries such as Moldova, Turkey and Kazakhstan donated their body parts to wealthy patients on the promise of payments of up to EU 15,000 at a time.

Prosecutors named a Turkish surgeon, Yusuf Sonmez, as a conduit between the donors and the patients, with the racket operating from the Medicus clinic in a run-down suburb of Pristina until late 2008. Mr Sonmez, who has been nicknamed "Doctor Vulture", is currently the subject of an international manhunt, although he denies the allegations against him. While no connection has yet been found between the current trafficking allegations and the "organ harvesting" claims of a decade ago, some doubt whether it can be purely coincidence.

Defending his report on Thursday, Mr Marty added that he often seen "terror" in the eyes of witnesses he had talked to. "We discovered that these things were known by intelligence services from the different countries," he said. "It was known by police services. It was known by numerous people who, in private, would say 'Yes we know, but for political reasons we made the choice or we have the duty to remain silent.'"

On Belarus, Fraud and the Future.

With the controversy over alleged electoral fraud in Belarus continuing, it interesting to note what one Paul Wesson, who claims to have been an OSCE election observer, has argued

The observers, despite the wild allegations against all of us, are by and large fair minded, educated. individuals from a cross section of backgrounds and, at this election, 44 different countries (precisely to deal with the allegations of bias).

Which makes it curious why the OSCE did not proclaim Saakashvili's rather high 96% election victory in Georgia in January 2004 as being flawed and why there were no serious rival opponents challenging Saakashvili after the "Rose Revolution" late in the previous year against Schevardnadze's government.

Mikheil Saakashvili	1,692,728	96.0
Teimuraz Shashiashvili	33,868	1.9
Roin Liparteliani	4,248	0.2
Zaza Sikharulidze	4,098	0.2
Kartlos Garibashvili	3,582	0.2
Zurab Kelekhsashvili	1,631	0.1
Against all	22,817	1.3
Total 82.8 % turnout, 1,762,972 registered voters	1,762,972	100.0

This was then followed by the claim,

...you seem to wish to perpetuate Lukashenko on the basis that the opposition cannot produce an economic argument, therefore they must not be voted for...the Belarusian 'books' are not open for inspection by the Belarusian people, therefore nobody can ever formulate a different economic policy to the one on offer.

There is no moral reason to "perpetuate" Lukashenko. Yet individuals outside Belarus cannot change the facts as they are overnight.

That oppositionists cannot even hazard a guess as to the kind of economic reforms they would put forward in the event of Lukashenko being removed from power. This does not make much sense. Charter97 says "no to dictatorial privatisation". But not to corrupt privatisations decided upon from unaccountable elites from above with little consent from below.

Besides Lukashenko not being a Stalin, they fail to say what sort of privatisation would happen on removing Lukashenko by peaceful methods. Given that privatisation is already happening in 2011, the chances could be that eventually the regime will cede political power as under Franco in Spain in the 1970s.

The key issue is: on what basis would Belarus move from having 70% of its industry controlled by the state sector. Would the oppositionists impose shock therapy or would they give guarantees that vital Belarus' industries would not be "downsized" and asset stripped and social provisions and pensions remain in tact? After all, it's for the people to decide.

But they cannot make a decision unless the opposition gives an outline of the sort of economic changes it would think need to be introduced. It is incumbent on the opposition to be transparent about where they get their funding from and what economic model they propose for Belarus.

The contradiction in arguing for transparency and openness whilst not disclosing what the economic plans for Belarus are once Lukashenko goes is one reason he can discredit them. If there were the groundswell of popular opinion for change then Lukashenko would not be able to defeat the oppositionists.

Even the Charter97 news agency lacks accountability, posing as a forum for dissent whilst censoring or refusing to have any comment online that asks questions about their economic policy or where many of the designer outfits agitating for change get their money from. Clarity on that has not been forthcoming.

The age of the heroic dissident seems to have died out after 1989. If there are those like Oscar Paya in Cuba who is equally opposed to the Castro junta and US style neoliberal "reforms" destroying social provision, then their voice is not being heard. It is odd that Belarus does not seem to have dissidents of the same sort.

Interestingly, Anne Applebaum, wife of Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, has argued in The Washington Post that is is precisely the failure to fund opposition enough has led Lukashenko to rig elections, batter protesters, and she accepts the claims of the Polish based Belsat that his true level of support is really around 30%.

This....is what the "decline of the West" looks like in the eastern half of Europe: The United States and Europe, out of money and out of ideas, scarcely fund the Belarusan opposition. Russia, flush with oil money once again, has agreed to back Lukashenko and fund his regime. Let's hope it costs them a lot more than they expect.

Yet this contradicts what numerous other sources have claimed about Lukashenko's popularity and Belsat may or may not be right. Moreover, Applebaum claims,

European foreign ministers cannot guarantee Lukashenko personal wealth. They cannot offer corrupt oil deals. They can talk about "freedom" - and they did - but they have to compete with others who talk about "the Chinese model," who offer more predictable forms of job security and who aren't bothered by a few arrests.

Perhaps those like Margaret Thatcher's former PR guru Tim Bell certainly are not so bothered about "a few arrests" but that applied with her governments attitude towards Chile in the 1970s and 1980s under Pinochet's right wing dictatorship which was far more brutal than Lukashenko's regime.

The fact that European ministers cannot do that much is hardly due to some self inflicted decline unconnected to neoliberal capitalism and thus to do solely with the withering of the West's confidence and belief in the superiority of its own values.

It is more due to the stalling of momentum that has resulted in the collapse of the appeal of "The West" created by the instability of neoliberal economic policies. For Belarus has weathered the global crash better in some respects than the Baltic Republics.

Back in 2002 John Laughland wrote of the inherent problems of the obsession with NATO expansion and "regime change" with regards Belarus that it was more cynically connected with power politics dressed up in talk of human rights,

The real reason why the west hates Lukashenko has nothing to do with concern for democracy or human rights. It is instead that, as a genuinely popular politician who has preserved his country from the worst ravages which economic reform has inflicted on its neighbours, Lukashenko is not given to taking orders.

In this respect, he is unlike any of the other senior former communist officials currently hobnobbing in Prague. The west's friends in eastern Europe today have their hands firmly on the commanding heights of political control in their countries, just as in many cases they personally did under communist dictatorship.

The west prefers such people because the demands it makes on post-communist countries are so unpopular. All eastern European states are required to sell off their national economic assets to foreigners, and close down their agriculture by accepting the dumping of subsidised EU food imports.

This creates massive social disruption and unemployment. In addition, they must spend at least 2% of their GDP on defence, preferably on arms made in the US.

Consequently, a small country like Lithuania, whose economy has collapsed so catastrophically, has just announced the purchase of $34m worth of Stinger missiles, made by the Raytheon Corporation of Tucson, Arizona.

When Tanzania announced it was spending $40m on a new civilian air traffic control system, there was an outcry; but Lithuania, whose official GDP is not much larger than Tanzania's, will have to spend $240m on arms every year as the price for Nato membership. And Lithuania is just one of seven new member states, all of which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on arms.

If things have not worked according to plan in Belarus, part of the blame has to be attributed to the West having squandered the opportunities in 1989-1991 and replaced Communism with doctrinaire neoliberal "reforms" that failed to take into account the needs of ordinary people and so ensured that its lost its allure.

Do Most Belarussians Not Support the Opposition to Lukashenko ?

Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian of the protests against Lukashenko following his election amidst claims of fraud,

Alexander Lukashenko and his black-shirted riot police reverted to type at the weekend, cracking heads and arresting opponents while fabricating a landslide election victory. This violent regression victimised the people of Belarus.

The EU blew its chance to bring Belarus in from the cold ( Monday 20 December 2010 )

Many Belarussians continue to vote Lukashenko and distrust the oppositionists. One important reason may be that they never spell out what their economic agenda actually is should Lukashenko be removed.

The financial backing of the US for the 'Denim Revolution' of 2006 and supposed "NGOs" hardly helps as all opposition per se can be smeared as "in the pay of the enemy".

As Andrew Wilson of the European Council on Foreign Relations has noted, Lukashenko depends on "a social contract with most ordinary Belarusians – relative prosperity in return for a relative lack of political freedom". His ability to maintain stability, order, and jobs (up to a point) was his main and possibly his only plus with voters. So when he fell out with his Russian patrons, Lukashenko sought new friends such as China, Venezuela – and the EU.

If "the West" has been to blame, then was a result of promoting neoliberal shock therapy style "reforms" instead of working towards an agreement with Belarus that did not mean it has to follow other nations the former Eastern bloc in being subjected to asset stripping, the rule of consultants and mass unemployment.

Michael Binyon, a former Moscow correspondent for The Times, has argued that Lukashenko still had support, despite the protests.

"Among many ordinary people I wouldn't say there is widespread support [for the opposition], they're pretty resigned to seeing Lukashenko continue in office..

...And he's not completely unpopular because Belarus has enjoyed a stable standard of living - it's not a high standard of living at all, but they've avoided some of the confrontations and disruptions that they've seen in other parts of the former Soviet Union. Pensioners for example still get a reasonable pension."

Lukashenko has been able since he came to power in 1994 of drawing attention to the way Belarus has been 'protected' from these negative consequences as well as the failures seldom ever mentioned in the mainstream media in Western nations with regards Poland and "katastrioka" in Russia.

What Lukashenko has realised is that China became the power to be reckoned with that it is because it rejected the Western model that Russia embraced after 1991 that was proposed as "the only option" by international financial institutions such as the IMF.

But Tisdall argues that Belarus is some sort of economic basket case and insinuates that Belarussians also partly have themselves to blame for voting incorrectly for Lukashenko without understanding the reasons why Lukashenko has been popular has lain in his curtailing of the the corruption and chaos of the 1990s.

Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, reassuringly described the post-election brutality as solely an internal matter. And Putin praised Lukashenko last week for taking "a clear course towards integration with Russia".

Whether Russia will deliver is the next big question. Having played the two sides off against each other to personally beneficial effect, Lukashenko now faces a bigger worry: an external debt of 52% of GDP, a $7bn trade gap, an unmodernised, largely state-owned economy, and rising expectations among 9.5 million Belarusians who have swapped political liberty for jam tomorrow.

The contention that Belarussians have sacrificed freedom for the illusion of security could be made about made increasingly about states even in the West. Only that Belarus is a repressive state in which elections are tampered with and opponents have gone missing.

A dangerous new development has been the increasing connection between capitalism with authoritarian state power has been to stimulate a degree of consent through consumerism and control a docile population whilst liberties pall.

Yet the direct comparisons in economic terms have to be with the neighbouring Baltic Republics. As Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers argued with regards the "Latvian Model" in The Guardian just today, (Latvia provides no magic solution for indebted economies )

Given a 25% fall in GDP during the crisis, such a growth rate would take a decade to just restore the size of Latvia's 2007 economy. Is this "dead cat" bounce sufficiently compelling for other EU states to follow it over the fiscal cliff?

The method by which the EU's creditor nations and banks would like to resolve this crisis is "internal devaluation": lower wages, public spending and living standards to make the debtors pay. This is the old IMF austerity doctrine that failed in the developing world. It looks like it is about to be reprised.

The EU policy seems to be for wage earners and pension savers to bail out banks for their legacy of bad mortgages and other loans that cannot be paid – except by going into poverty.

The fear of the practical impact of neoliberal policies clearly is not something that Euro-Atlanticists such as Tisdall want to put up for critical discussion. Moreover, the evidence has been that businesses have been attracted to investing in Belarus in recent years.

Far from it being opposed to 'the Chinese model', there seems to be increasingly a greater convergence between authoritarianism, corporate capitalism and globalisation that Western powers have colluded in where it has suited their interests and the monied elites.

The Opposition to Lukashenko goes Naked.

Certain protests against Lukashenko are even more curious than those staged by the designer revolutionaries of Charter97. The Ukrainian group FEMEN get photogenic Ukrainian girls to pose naked as a protest against the role of women but also against "male power" of which Bat'ka is seen as but one example in neighbouring Belarus.

Ukrainian girls from Femen movement held a rally "Kick Batska out!" at the walls of the Belarusian embassy in Kiev and made an appeal to Belarusians. "We want to support the brotherly people, exhausted by the totalitarian regime of Lukashenko ruling, on the eve of the presidential elections in Belarus. Hey, Belarusians, take your chance! Dethrone Lukashenko," Femen statement says.

"Privatization of power is a concept, unacceptable by modern standards. The cult of personality is a relic of the long-deceased Soviet Union, and it's a sacred duty of all Belarusians to stop it," the statement says in the Blog of Art Group.( Telegraf )

What funds FEMEN ? Can "feminism" be promoted by posing scantily clad in Kiev by trading on the stereotypes of Ukrainian women as "for sale" to "sexpats"? Or could it be a cynical ruse to protest against such things in order to get noticed and advance careers ?

An Interpretation of Events in Belarus.

Last night in Minsk on 19 December 2010 there were riots caused by the usual groups who contest election results in Belarus and the police acting brutally to disperse protesters after Lukashenko got just under 80% of the vote.

There are serious allegations of electoral fraud and the OSCE has regarded the election as flawed, even though the OSCE has had a history of partisan recognition with regards rigged elections ( such as with Saakashvili's in Georgia in January 2004 in which he got 96%).

The BBC carried a report that stated,

Security forces in Belarus have arrested hundreds of people who protested against the result of Sunday's presidential election.

At least seven presidential candidates were among those detained. Some of them were reportedly also beaten by police.

The OSCE called the poll "flawed" while the US and EU condemned the crackdown.

But President Alexander Lukashenko, who was re-elected for a fourth term with almost 80% of the vote, accused opposition supporters of "banditry".

"The vandals and hooligans lost their human face. They simply turned into beasts," he told a news conference in Minsk.

"You saw how our law-enforcers behaved. They stood firm and acted exclusively within the bounds of the law. They defended the country and people from barbarism and ruin."

"There will be no revolution or criminality in Belarus."

The Guardian reported, ( Alexander Lukashenko wins fourth term as Belarus president ),

The result was announced hours after riot police dispersed thousands of demonstrators protesting against alleged voting fraud.

The Belarus Central Election Commission said preliminary results showed Lukashenko had collected 79.67% of the vote in yesterday's election. The next-highest vote among the nine candidates was just 2.56%.

The announcement followed a violent night in which police dispersed demonstrators who massed outside the main government office to denounce alleged vote-rigging.

Protesters broke windows and smashed glass doors in the government building, which also houses the election commission, but were repelled by riot police waiting inside.

Hundreds more police and Interior Ministry troops then arrived in trucks, causing most of the demonstrators to flee. Some tried to hide in the courtyards of nearby apartment buildings, but many were bludgeoned by troops.

Several of the candidates who ran against Lukashenko were arrested and the top opposition leader, Vladimir Neklyaev, was forcibly taken from the hospital where he was being treated after he and two other candidates were beaten during clashes with government forces.

Neklyaev's aide said seven men in civilian clothing had wrapped him in a blanket on his hospital bed and carried him outside. His location is currently unknown.

Russia and the EU are closely monitoring the election, having offered major economic inducements to tilt Belarus in their direction.

In recent years, Lukashenko has quarrelled intensively with the Kremlin, his main sponsor, as Russia raised prices for the below-market gas and oil on which the Belarus economy depends.

His tone changed this month, however, after Russia agreed to drop tariffs for oil exported to Belarus – a concession worth an estimated $4bn (£2.5bn) a year.

Lukashenko has also been working to curry favour with the west, which has criticised his 16-year rule for human rights abuses and repressive politics.

Last week, he called for improved ties with the US, which he had cast as an enemy in previous years. However, the violent dispersal of opposition protests makes a rapprochement with the west unlikely.

Whatever irregularities there are can be challenged but that there is a strategy by Western NGOs to replace Lukashenko with a pro-US and Atlanticist group of politicians paid for and answerable to foreign powers is hardly news.

The fact is that Lukashenko does command the majority of votes in Belarus even without the stuffing of ballot boxes.

Unfortunately in recent years the proliferation of instant global news has led to designer democracy groups funded by those like George Soros to get societies more open to money power and oligarchies that support Western geopolitical strategies over creating truly accountable democracies beyond the rich and well connected.

Andrej Dynko has written an article for The Guardian today that attempts objectivity under the headline Belarus election: The last dictator in Europe.

Dynko's Nasha Niva is supported by groups like the Prague Society for International Cooperation which is sponsored by think tanks such as the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society which supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and for "Democratic Geopolitics".

A full list of "Partners and Friends" includes the Prague Marriott Hotel and Radio Free Europe. That does not mean Dynko is not credible but increasingly it has become difficult to distinguish between those wanting truth and those who advocate a propaganda line.

Dynko writes,

.......never have there been so many candidates. But the number of candidates is no guarantee of any substantial political change.

The country itself has changed a lot in 15 years, despite the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. Its economy has grown at twice the rate of neighbouring Ukraine's. This is a Chinese, or rather a Singaporean model – and Lukashenko is convinced it is the one best suited to the Belarusian mentality and geopolitical situation.

Not everyone agrees with him, however. A parallel society has grown up: rock music, samizdat and discussion clubs are all flourishing. In order to catch this wave Lukashenko is ready to commandeer what used to be the opposition's seditious slogan, "For Freedom".

Belarus has avoided the period of neoliberal shock therapy that devastated and indebted the Baltic Republics which is why Lukashenko has pointed to the freedom from unemployment and consumer pleasures.

That is no reason to downgrade the repression in Belarus but that if the only choice is between Lukashenko and neoliberal "reforms" then many Belarussians will continue to stay with Lukashenko through despairing on an alternative.

Freedom is freedom. Yet those seeing Charter97 as a successor to Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia ( many of whose supporters did not want US style capitalism, though that's in the Orwellian memory hole now ) have failed to see why the opposition is not so popular as it could be.

Lukashenko is following the Singaporean or Chinese model as he is authoritarian and the attractions of the economic model in neighbouring countries offered not much to those who would be thrown on the scrapheap by asset stripping, the rule of consultants and the "Marriott men".

Charter97 claims it opposes "dictatorial privatisation" But the privatisations after 1990 were hardly 'democratic' with using former activists their connections to act as consultants, sell off plant and destroy whole swathes of manufacturing to create a "correct" investment climate.

Few in Poland realised in 1990 that by 2004 unemployment rates would still be so high nor how draconian the neoliberal Balcerowicz Plan was going to be. Balcerowicz knew that which is why he cynically called for "extraordinary politics" to ram through his reforms by exploiting the euphoria of liberation.

In Belarus, Lukashenko's rise to be "Bat'ka" depended after 1995 in his ability to crack down on the corruption and chaos witnessed under Yeltsin in Russia in the 1990s and the fear that US involvement in its economy would replicate that in Poland, a nation with a stronger economy and sense of national identity.

Reform that would benefit Belarus and the rest of Europe can happen but only if "Democracy Promotion" is no longer tied cynically to privatising the economy into the hands of investors interested only in short term profits and plundering a "liberated" economy.

Even so, that democratic reform is necessary is obvious, despite all the propaganda about Lukashenko's "social market economy", combining economic advances with a "Chinese" style state in Eastern Europe.

The harassment of journalists, police brutality and threats to close down Nasha Niva are bad and need to be condemned. A government that operates on principles of violence to its citizens to coerce conformity is fundamentally wrong.

But the question has moved since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and the USSR in 1991 from freedom from one party states to one of "freedom for what ?". As if its chaos on offer, more people will be prepared to surrender their freedom to authoritarian regimes.

There is no reason why being sceptical of the tactics and objectives of oppositionists in Belarus means necessary support for Lukashenko. If democracy has not prevailed in most parts of the post-Soviet bloc the reasons go beyond simplistic notions of Lukashenko being a New Hitler.

For as important as repression has been in propping up the regime, it is not the only explanation as to why he has retained power in Minsk despite all the attempts of oppositionists to undermine his authority.