theglobaljournal.net: Latest articles of Laurent Vinatier

Belarus: Harlem Shake(s) in Slow Motion

2013-04-23T16:06:31Z

At a first glance, Belarus appears to be a calm and empty country, which many consider to be stuck in a Soviet-era time warp. Others describe it as a black hole, a ghost country. But looking more closely, the observer may be surprised to see the stage becoming more colorful and animated, somewhat reminiscent of the classic “Harlem Shake”, the delirious dance that has engulfed improbable places around the world... Not everyone is flailing their arms anarchically, in strange disguises, waving strange objects, and dancing in random chaos... More simply, they are silently living and running, writing, fighting, creating, shouting, and hoping for a better future that they wish would come sooner. Belarus’ “Shake” is in slow motion but it is continuous, and spreads throughout most of society. However, the convulsions are likely to last for several years before any changes manifest themselves.

Paradoxically, it was in a graveyard that the shaking process first began. In the immediate fringes of Minsk, along an anonymous road, lies the forest of Kurapaty. There, around 30,000 persons between 1937 and 1941 were executed by the Soviets (or by Nazis invaders, according to the Belarusian government’s version). Looking at the forest, only evergreen canopy dominate. Yet by examining the same space more closely, a regiment of wooden crosses materializes. As soon as the murdered people would start moving or be moved, a story about Belarusian identity, distinct from Soviet uniformity, would be unearthed, bringing back the Belarusian People’s Front and its democratic attempts in the early 90s.

Since Lukashenko’s ascent to power in the mid-90s, no decadent shakes can occur at the surface. Instead, an intense struggle for individual rights and personal honor has been pushed underground. For several years, Belarus has seen the development of a few independent trade unions. These are non-politicized, and rather prefer to focus on the daily issues that the workers face. One of the most active independent trade unions is at a mine called “Granit”, located in Mikashevichy in the Brest-Litovsk region, near Poland’s eastern border. On 1st April, Granit’s trade-union secretary-Treasurer, Anatoli Litvinko was fired. One year ago, his wife, Ludmila, was dismissed, along with almost all the activists who had created the trade union - Oleg Stahaevich Nicholas Karyshev, Vitaly Pashechka and Gennady Pavlovsky. It triggered no upheaval but it demonstrates rising tensions.

Nevertheless, one of the most promising Belarusian “Shakes” remains what the political opposition is gradually building. Large Belarusian squares rest empty since December 2010. Outside, there are no billboards of opposition figures, nor plates indicating the premises of a political party or non-registered or opposition media. Inside small, private flats however, around street corners, at the 1st or 2nd entrance, somewhere, a substantial contingent of bright, and often young, journalists, experts, intellectuals and politicians permanently brainstorm, deliberate, elaborate strategies, cancel those strategies, adjust those strategies, communicate with their fellow citizens, meet with them, visit them, resist official pressures and learn a lot. Compared to the leading candidates in 2010, the next generation appears to be far more efficient. The opposition is gaining significant momentum for what will perhaps be the final Shake in the 2015.presidential campaign. Meanwhile, however, as a way to relax, a “Belarusian Shake” on October or Independence Square could be fun.

A Dictatorship’s Success Stories

Belarus: Year 0 ...Once Again!

A Dictatorship’s Success Stories

2012-12-28T18:19:43Z

Aleksandr Lukashenko is resilient. The President of Belarus has stood firm against the European Union (EU) and its renewed political and economic sanctions in response to his increasingly autocratic rule. In six months, he has freed two political prisoners while a dozen remain in custody. On September 23, nation wide parliamentary elections ran smoothly in an atmosphere of total indifference from the great majority of the population. Russia, for its part, supports Belarus with financial subsidies, ready to buy out everything possible at discounted prices.

The village was still part of the Soviet Union when Yuri Chizh – today one of Belarus’ richest businessmen, with close links to President Aleksandr Lukashenko – preferred to run around in the neighboring forest rather than attend school. To get up to childhood mischief, he had to carefully avoid his family’s bright yellow home, which stood only a few meters between the school and the kolkhoz. At that time, it seems, the two intersecting streets of Sabali in Biarozovsky district, 250 kilometres south of Minsk, were full of life. Forty years later, while the petrified Soviet Brezhnev era has disappeared into history, the village has plunged into a kind of hibernation. The school has been dismantled, and families with children have fled to the cities. Most of the wooden houses lie empty – indeed, only 70 pensioners remain.

The kolkhoz holds on unconvincingly, with two or three old tractors languishing in a yard. The endless wet and flat countryside, dotted with familiar birch trees, has become noticeably sadder. The yellow house is slightly less colorful.

Chizh had to leave for Minsk relatively early, in order to commence studies in electronics at the Belarusian Polytechnical Institute. From then on, everything moved quickly. He had a chance to exercise his entrepreneurial skills during perestroika, and now heads a business empire based on the Triple holding, which reprocesses and exports oil products bought from Russia at discounted prices. Chizh has also diversified into civil engineering, construction, manufacturing, restaurants, food production and a network of hypermarkets – the Prostore chain. He has been especially prominent in media headlines in recent times for building the first luxury Kempinski hotel in central Minsk, just behind the Circus and near the unchanged Sovietera Gorki Park. Although associated with the Slovenian Riko Group in the context of that project, Chizh has failed, however, to escape the EU’s sanction list.

Blacklisted since March, Chizh is undoubtedly paying for his close links with Lukashenko, and, by implication, for his impressive success. Yet in compensation for the European punishment, his boss has just granted Chizh a 99-year concession over his native Sabali village. Essentially, this means that every single square inch of the land where he grew up ultimately belongs to him. After years of fruitful wanderings in the capital, the oligarch has returned home. He has brought with him an immense sponsorship project focused on building a large complex boasting a hotel, restaurant, ethno-museum and a host of other infrastructure. In theory, Sabali will benefit as a revitalized rural center. At the very least, the faded paintwork of the wooden houses will be refreshed.

Belarus is not devoid of successful private companies. Chizh’s Triple ranks among the leaders, but many others follow close behind. Alexander Moshensky’s Santa Impex for food – particularly seafood – processing, Pavel Topuzidis’ Tabak Invest, Alexander Shakutin’s Amkodor for road-building machinery, or Anatoly Ternavsky’s Univest-M group – with activities ranging from petrochemical exports to banking, restaurants and construction – have no reason to be ashamed. Among these business leaders, only Ternavsky has been the subject of EU sanctions. Notably, the other three have significant investments in neighboring European countries. The old Belarusian economic clichés of arms traders linked to rogue states (such as fellow oligarch Vladimir Peftiev – blacklisted) and manufacturers of heavy machinery have faded away. Now engaged in more conventional enterprises, most ‘normal’ Belarusian businesses owe their success to efficient and skilled CEOs, whose first talent is to maintain close, loyal and ‘friendly’ relations with their unique common business boss: Lukashenko. Ironically, in the few remaining post-Soviet dictatorships, the Marxist economic model has been reversed. Political superstructures today prevail over the base.

The new bourgeois class of Belarus, owners of the means of production, have been reduced to acting as presidential ‘wallet persons,’ or koshelki as they are nicknamed in Russian. They cannot even pretend to stand alone as independent partners or shareholders in the national wealth. Lukashenko usually considers these individuals as simple business managers tasked with implementing his instructions. Their dependence is as prodigious as their efforts to maintain the President’s confidence. Ternavsky, for instance, has been obliged to employ Lukashenko’s daughter-in-law, Anna. He also sponsors the Presidential Sport’s Club, headed by Dmitri Lukashenko, Alexander’s son and Anna’s husband. Meanwhile, Chizh seems to prefer playing ice hockey on the same team as the President. He cannot refuse to sponsor the cultural resuscitation of Belarus’ birch-dotted countryside in the south, and when, for mysterious reasons, several of his top managers were arrested, he remained silent. The new Christian cross presented recently to Sabali by a Polish historical society, commemorating the Polish-Belarusian insurrection against Tsarist Russia in 1863 – and which will hardly be a tourist attraction in the middle of the kolkhoz – has a poignant political meaning.

In Belarus, Lukashenko decides almost all matters. The 58-year old former state farm manager assumed power in 1994, and recently described himself in a widely publicized interview as “the last and only dictator in Europe.” Though most infamous internationally as a result of accusations of torture and other human rights abuses – often focused on opposition figures – his political choices also determine business strategies. Chizh may have willingly agreed to allocate some money to his childhood village so long as he could also run his business according to his own interests and economic rationale. Now on the EU sanctions list, he has fallen as collateral damage in the President’s acrimonious relations with Europe, entrapped within Belarusian diplomatic strategies.

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By Laurent Vinatier

Photography courtesy of Alexander Vasukovich

Belarus: Year 0… Once Again!

2011-12-20T10:38:10Z

It has been one year since the last Presidential election, with its massive fraud, vote-rigging and harsh crackdown against opposition political and civil figures, including, of course, all the inconvenient Presidential candidates. Some of them, including Andrei Sannikau and Mikalai Statkevitch, are still behind bars, together with the human rights defender Alex Byalyatski. The joint statement recently issued by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and EU High Representative Catherine Ashton, sadly commemorating the first anniversary of this Belarusian degradation, sounds familiar. It seems to have been heard all year long, at each step of this deepening deterioration, in political, economic, social and monetary domains.

"Over the past 12 months, the Belarusian authorities have imprisoned peaceful demonstrators, suppressed non-violent protests, and worked to silence independent voices. There have also been credible reports of degrading and inhumane treatment of political prisoners. New laws will further restrict citizens’ fundamental freedoms of assembly, association and expression. Support for civil society will also be reduced." Not to mention the financial situation. Belarus’ economy is now heavily dependent on Russian loans, either directly or through the Eurasian Economic Community. Money has been devalued. Foreign exchange reserves are dramatically low. Inflation grows. To survive, Minsk has no choice but to sell all its national assets to Russian buyers, all too happy to impose their conditions. Clearly, Belarus will become the last subject of the Russian Federation.

The European and US statements of condemnation are certainly useful. They are also, in effect, very limited. A year ago, Belarus was already lost, so far as the West was concerned. One year later and all hope has gone because there is a structural obstacle. How can a supportive EU policy be implemented? Everyone agrees that a more effective EU policy would be to intensify non-political cooperation towards civil society rather than increasing economic sanctions. The EU might then be able to provide technical assistance in carrying out reforms. But in the meantime, Belarus authorities have adopted a number of amendments to forbid the work of Non-Governmental Organizations, not only the foreign ones but also the local NGOs financed by external powers. For instance, the Foreign Ministry of Belarus has just refused to renew the accreditation of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Belarus. The limited voices of the Warsaw-based Information Office, Solidarity with Democratic Belarus, are neverthless eloquent. However, while receiving news from the field is, and will remain, essential, what change can it lead to? Belarus is not Libya. From an EU point of view, let’s admit that Belarus cannot be saved!