"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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.