BELARUS: Poles Point to Denial of Rights

By Pavol Stracansky Reprint | | Print |

Pavol Stracansky

WARSAW, Nov 29 2005 (IPS) - The West is not doing enough to raise awareness of human rights abuses in Belarus, human rights groups in Eastern Europe say.

Belarus came into focus after Polish dailies Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita blacked out front page stories and pictures as if by a censor, with the caption “This is what freedom of the press looks like in Belarus”.

They also carried a message from Amnesty International, which had organised the protests in cooperation with the newspapers, calling on Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko to respect human rights treaties on freedom of expression.

“We would like to see more countries, not just Poland, protesting like this,” Amnesty spokesperson in Poland Mirella Tanek told IPS. “Silence is the very worst thing. People need to be made aware of what is happening in Belarus.”

Belarus, which became an independent state when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, has been described by officials in Washington and Brussels as the last dictatorship in Europe.

Lukashenko, a former Soviet apparatchik who backed the 1991 coup attempt by communist hardliners against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in 1994 and has since earned a reputation as an autocrat employing Stalinist methods to ensure his rule..

In 1996 he disbanded parliament and handpicked MPs to symbolically ratify his decrees and ensure there was no challenge to his presidency. In 2004 he held what the international community denounced as a rigged referendum which allowed him to change the constitution so he could stand for a third term as president. Presidential elections next summer are widely expected to be rigged again.

He has also violently suppressed any popular opposition to his regime while also either outlawing or forcing out of business any independent media.

Rights activists and some Belarussians who have left the country say Lukashenko’s opponents can face torture, intimidation and incarceration.

And since the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine last year Lukashenko, fearing a similar uprising in his own country, has banned all foreign financing for political activities in Belarus. He has accused several countries of trying to foment a revolution in his country.

He appears to have the support only of Russia among the international community.

Rights groups in eastern Europe say that officials in Western European countries are not only doing little to raise awareness of the situation in Belarus, but are themselves unaware of rights abuses in the former Soviet state.

“The West needs to do more. Brussels is totally unprepared, and doesn’t know what it will do when presidential elections come around next year,” Milan Mic from the Pontis Foundation in Slovakia, which runs projects to raise awareness of the situation in Belarus told IPS. The foundation recently hosted members of the Belarussian opposition in Slovak capital Bratislava.

“We also know from our experience that officials in some of the older EU member states, such as Italy or France, are remarkably unaware of Belarus,” Mic added. “It is states in central and eastern Europe, Poland, Slovakia, and Lithuania, who are, within Europe, most active on Belarus.”

Poland has emerged as the most prominent critic of the Lukashenko regime.

Parts of what is today Belarus were until the second world war Polish territory, and Belarus’s population of almost 10 million includes 400,000 ethnic Poles.

In recent years Polish leaders have adopted a harsher line towards Belarus as Lukashenko’s regime has grown increasingly dictatorial.

During campaigning for recent parliamentary and presidential elections in Poland, the main political parties all promised a tough foreign policy on Belarus, and expressed concern over treatment of the ethnic Polish minority.

This provoked an equally stern response from Lukashenko..

He accused Poland of interfering in Belarussian affairs, and claimed that the Polish minority in Belarus was plotting to overthrow him. This summer he banned a Polish non-governmental organisation, the Dialogue European Fund which promotes cooperation between scientists in central and eastern Europe. Lukashenko said it was a front for foreign spies.

He then ordered riot police to raid the headquarters of the Union of Poles in Belarus – a group representing ethnic Poles. The leader was arrested.. The police said the organisation was trying to lead a revolution.

The Polish group had said only weeks earlier that the police were not investigating the murder of ethnic Polish activist Jusefa Varaksa who had spoken out against Lukashenko. Warsaw recalled its ambassador to Belarus.

Belarussian activists fighting the Lukashenko regime have welcomed the newspaper protests, even though they say these are unlikely to have any effect on the regime.

“It is very encouraging. But Belarus state media will not report it. Lukashenko will welcome provincial Russian journalists and show them what a clean city Minsk is and what a wonderful country Belarus is,” Ales Ancipienka of the Belarus Journalists Association told Gazeta Wyborcza.