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.

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.

The Myths of the War in Kosovo in 1999.

The myths surrounding what is termed "liberal interventionism" have been challenged by Neil Clark in The Guardian ( Kosovo and the myth of liberal intervention ) where he cites the facts about how the decision to back the KLA have had an appalling impact on people there which have been criticised by human rights groups.

'The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles ... Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." So declared the neocon US senator (and current foe of WikiLeaks) Joseph Lieberman back in 1999 at the height of the US-led military intervention against Slobodan Miloševic's Yugoslavia.

It would be interesting to hear what Senator Lieberman makes of the report of the Council of Europe – Europe's premier human rights watchdog – on his favourite band of freedom fighters. The report, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, details horrific rights abuses it claims have been carried out by the KLA, the west's allies in the war against Yugoslavia 11 years ago.

The council claims that civilians – Serbian and non-KLA-supporting Kosovan Albanians detained by the KLA in the 1999 hostilities – were shot in northern Albania and their kidneys extracted and sold on the black market. It names Hashim Thaçi, the former leader of the KLA and Kosovo's prime minister, as the boss of a "mafia-like" group engaged in criminal activity – including heroin trading – since before the 1999 war.

Clark is correct to emphasise that the KLA and the regime that Thaci has led since NATO "intervened" is not only far from "liberal" but has been positively ghastly, being a clan based mafia style network involved in heroin trafficking to the rest of Europe supplying prostitutes from Moldova and even trade in human organs. The Guardian reported,

A Council of Europe report into organ trafficking in Kosovo linked the Medicus case to a wider criminal network in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which began trading in organs in 1999. A faction within the rebel guerilla army loyal to Thaci has been accused of overseeing a racket involving Serb captives. A "handful" were said, in the report, to have been shot in the head, then had their kidneys extracted. It is believed the kidneys were flown to Istanbul in ischemia bags.

Kosovo is a narco-state whose elites have continually been rebranded from being criminal terrorists into PR savvy slick suited politicians. But the reality has remained a state whose origin were mired in criminality and a shoddy realpolitik dressed up as "liberal intervention" from the start.

The reason why Kosovo has been so dysfunctional, so much so that many Kosovans have detested Thaci's regime, is the lack of security and the rampant corruption that has been the staple of a government in which power is sought as a means of preserving mafia interests and the economy mismanaged.

The fact is that Richard Holbrooke backed the KLA in 1999 as a means of ramping up tensions within Kosovo sufficient to create an intensified Serbian backlash and which gave the impression there was a systematic policy of Serb "genocide" that meant NATO had to prevent Milosevic as a "New Hitler".

There is no doubt Milosevic wanted to use Kosovo himself as a way of ramping up tension by increasing repression to share up an ailing regime in Serbia following the failure of his notion of a Greater Serbia. Most post communist nationalists in the former Yugoslavia sought to do the same.

Yet the notion of a selfless "liberal intervention" is an oversimplified myth as Holbrook and the CIA had given material and military aid to the KLA prior to the NATO action in 1999 when the State department had in 1998 classified the KLA as a "terrorist organisation" before they were subsequently thought useful.

The reason for this lies in geopolitics: by bringing to an end the instability in the Balkans thought to be the work of Milosevic alone, the USA could advance the plans to get the AMBO pipeline constructed. The Serbia's defeat and the creation of Camp Bondsteel near to the Macedonian border was part of that.

The consequences were immediately to bring closure on the Balkan Wars and create a new order there. But the cost was that which Neil Clark mentions here,

....ethnic cleansing and rights abuses in the region continued. Under the Nato occupation an estimated 200,000 ethnic Serbs, Roma and other minorities from south Kosovo, and almost the whole Serb population of Pristina, have been forced from their homes.

The waffle about Holbrooke's "tough moral choices" offered by his eulogists in obituaries offered on his death yesterday ignore his role in backing the KLA and the "dirty diplomacy" behind the scenes which has far more to do than just dealing with someone as brutal as Milosevic.

At the time in 1999 those critical of Serbia and Milosevic such as Misha Glenny at the time thought the intervention would do more harm than good and a brutal conflict was accelerated into the ethic cleansing committed by the KLA against Serbs but also against the Roma in Kosovo too.

This was mentioned by even by Tim Judah in his Kosovo War and Revenge as the price of the intervention. Yet the not so hidden history of Holbrooke's diplomacy has been scarcely mentioned in the media. The cost of which was shown in the subsequent evils continued by the Kosovan state.

These include not only Kosovo becoming the European entrepot for the heroin supplied by the Taliban in Afghanistan but also extending the network for Al Qaida to further its operations in Europe too. Another consequence inherent in backing gangsters to carry out "regime change" whilst branding it "humanitarian intervention".

Khodorkovsky is Portrayed as a "Dissident".

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a criminal whose Yukos oil corporation was build on force, fraud and contract killings. Yet because he has rebranded himself as a designer revolutionary, opinion in the West tends to accept him as some kind of martyr in Putin's supposedly "Neo-Soviet" regime.

Time and time again, the same repetitive propaganda tropes are recycled. A despotism in different period clothes versus the enlightened within the regime who rebel against it through some 'spiritual convertion'. Look at the assertion here by the writer Boris Akunin in The Guardian today,

Over the next few months, we exchanged letters. I asked questions, the prisoner of Siberia replied. And gradually I became aware that my curiosity for my subject was changing, at first into a deep sympathy, and latterly into a growing admiration for the sheer force of personality of this individual.

Yes, Khodorkovsky has been very unlucky in his fate, but we, his compatriots, have been unbelievably lucky: the party of human dignity is today embodied by an individual who conducts himself in a model fashion and does not bend or break under pressure. I do not rule out even that the pitiless machine of oppression will break itself on his resolve.

Akunin's banal homily and distortion of history to portray this chiselling crook as some kind of idealist is utterly unconvincing propaganda. It's absurd to portray Khodorkovsky as some successor to the Decembrists of 1825 who tried to challenge the Tsar and who had honourable intentions.

For a start, the Decembrists were aristocrats who had developed a deep love of Russia through seeing the awakening of the Russian people during the struggle to remove Napoleon and the epic events of 1812. Loyalty to nation and the narod motivated them. As it did the narod who opposed Napoleon's self interested propaganda of "liberation".

The motley array of fraudsters who back Khodorkovsky have total contempt for ordinary Russians, none of whom get a mention in this propaganda puff piece. Akunin simply does not care about them, the way oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky stripped the country and enriched themselves after 1990.

...what is striking is that the aristocrats, the party of human dignity in today's Russia, are represented not by a Solzhenitsyn or a Mandela but by a former billionaire. Although this is perhaps no more striking than the fact that his predecessor as the figurehead of the aristocratic movement was the father of the atomic bomb and a man who was three times named a Hero of Socialist Labour, Andrei Sakharov. History just loves paradoxes.

History might love paradoxes but not those simply invented purely in the heads of mendacious propagandists based on false parallels. Sakharov was a brave man who had never cheated or swindled people as Khodorkovsky had. Khodorkovsky used the freedom after 1991 to distort and pervert it.

If historians in the future will need to explain a paradox it is why freedom was distorted to mean the freedom of powerful oligarchs to defraud the public interest.

Democracy Promotion in Russia has been counter-productive. It has actually set back the possibility of Russian people supporting liberal and democratic reform by having the same opposition networks of those funded by Western NGOs and advocating the same doctrinaire neoliberal economic "shock therapy" that had catastrophic consequences in the 1990s.

For as Anatol Lieven has argued, the sheer social distance of supposed Russian liberals from the Russian people, as well as their contempt and suspicion of them, is one of the main reasons why Russian high politics remains a contest between different oligarchical factions of ins and outs.

This is a reason why "Democracy Promotion" as it exists is fake and blatantly partisan in favour of "our oligarchs".

In that struggle, favours those that will weaken the Russian state the better to get control of the oil gas and other assets, one reason Putin is the target of so much hatred by those like Edward Lucas, without understanding-or caring-about how hated these people are. And their obvious and documented criminality.

The nature of Khodorkovsky's game was shown in a short excerpt from the interview Debtor Nation: The Hijacking of America’s Economy, in which the economist Dr. Michael Hudson gave ACRES USA in January 2008 ...

ACRES: And this is what brought on the Mexican standoff, the standoff between Putin and that oligarch ...

HUDSON: Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

ACRES: Right, he imprisoned him. Was that a sort of running up the flag to tell the rest of them what was going to happen?

HUDSON: Khodorkovsky not only had been the most notorious tax evader in Russia, but having privatized Russian oil, he was then about to turn around and sell his company to Exxon so that he could take the money out of the country in much the same way that Berezovsky and other Russian oligarchs had done.

This would have essentially sold out Russia’s natural resources to its major Cold War enemy, the United States. Russia would have been economically destroyed had Khodorkovsky gone through with it. Khodorkovsky also announced that he was going to run for president and be the main funder of the right-wing Pinochetista party there. It actually was called “The Party of Right Forces.” So of course Putin threw him in jail, quite rightly.

Appendix

"[Western journalists] might begin by making a comparison between the amount of space, and outrage, devoted by the Western media to this [Khodorkovsy] trial and the limited attention and anger directed by the same Western media to the process by which Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the other "oligarchs" acquired their immense wealth in the first place. It is not just that while Khodorkovsky's trial was deeply flawed, the legal case against him was well-based and credible.

More important is the comparative damage done to Russia by the two processes. Khodorkovsky's trial has undermined to some degree Western and Russian domestic investment in the Russian energy sector. The massive theft of Russian state resources by Khodorkovsky and others in the 1990s had infinitely worse effects.

This was the single greatest example of such plundering in the whole of modern history. It crippled the ability of the Russian state to provide basic services to its population - including for long periods even wages and pensions. As for state services, the collapse of state revenues had a disastrous effect on their funding, pay and morale.

Before indulging in self-righteous denunciations of the Russian government, Westerners also need to ask themselves where Russia's stolen billions went. Jupiter? Pluto? No. The stolen funds of the Russian people largely went into Western banks, Western real estate, and Western luxury goods. Russians may have been the thieves, but Westerners were their fences.

It is universally recognized that official corruption in Russia is a disastrous barrier to that country's development. The defense of Khodorkovsky, however, essentially rests on the idea that the enormous corruption of the 1990s should now be legitimized, while ordinary Russian policemen, judges and officials should be required to live on their miserable salaries for the sake of honesty and patriotism.

This proposition is intellectually, politically, psychologically and above all morally vacuous. "

From "Is Khodorkovsky Really the Victim?", an article written by Anatol Lieven that appeared in The International Herald Tribune in June 2005 after Khodorkovsky's first conviction.