On The Map

Karl Naylor writes:

Yet again ignorant British journalists have been depicting Belarus as some Stalinist theme park and the opposition in the Belarus Free Theatre as some kind of 1968 style wave of revolution. Nick Cohen, who like Charter 97 supported the Iraq War, writes in The Observer (The Fine Art of Making a Drama Out of A Crisis):

“The Belarus Free Theatre arrived in London last week and seemed to take us from the 2010s to the 1970s. Everything was as it had been in the cold war. Just as Havel and Kundera came to speak for oppressed Czechs, so the actors from Europe's last dictatorship are the most prominent and bravest critics of Belarus's rotting Brezhnevian state.

Just as Tom Stoppard was a friend to east European dissidents during communism, so he is a friend to Belarussia's underground artists today. Following tradition once more, Stoppard welcomed them to Britain on behalf of Index on Censorship, which Stephen Spender created in 1972 to speak for persecuted Soviet writers.

Ironic asides, which so many artists deployed to survive and subvert communism, peppered my conversation with Natalia Koliada, the theatre's founder and a woman with the relaxed courage of a committed democrat who accepts the risk of persecution. She tells the grim story of how the secret police have threatened her husband and forced her company to perform in bars or private houses or in the woods before an audience she must vet to ensure it does not contain informers, and then pulls herself up short. A grin breaks out on her elfin face and she declares: "Our dictator still calls our secret police the KGB. At least he's honest about that."

They met Harold Pinter just before he died and he thundered that the Belarussians had to realise Britain under Tony Blair was a kind of dictatorship as well. Members of the company patiently explained the realities of everyday life in Belarus and even the grudging Pinter had to admit that maybe the British state was not so bad after all.

One of the first plays the company tried to perform was 4.48 Psychosis, by Sarah Kane, a wrenching dramatisation of suicide and depression, which are at extraordinary high levels in Belarus.

The censor was in a quandary. He knew perfectly well why the Free Theatre wanted to stage the play. But as a functionary of Alexander Lukashenko's dictatorship, he could not admit that mental illness depresses the subject population.

"You can't show it because there is no depression in Belarus," he explained.”

On the face of it, the Belarus Free Theatre can only be a liberating force in Belarus. Lukashenko's regime it is true is propped up by a kitsch aesthetic harking back to the days of the Soviet Union and according to the BFT website, “The current situation in the cultural sphere of Belarus is influenced by several factors that negatively impact both the training of new theatrical staff and also the evolution of the theatrical process in general. Meantime, the theatrical environment has the greatest influence over the formation of the country’s population progressive way of thinking. All theatres are state-owned. All main directors and art managers are appointed by Ministry of Culture and approved by the head of state. Ministry of Culture issued a Law on Censorship. Two thirds of theatres repertoire is pirated ones.”

Yet a theatre company which states that it is primarily an aesthetic opposition' but which also claims it will disband as soon as Lukashenko is removed sounds explicitly political. There is no reason why it should disband should Lukashenko cease to be the leader of Belarus if the idea of a dissident theatre company is to organise itself as though 'communism' did not exist. That was the aim of the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia and Poland. That principle seems now to have been reversed on the pretence that the BFT represents what Vaclav Havel called 'anti-politics'.

It's also somewhat curious that it was set up in March 2005, shortly before the faked 'Denim Revolution', of 2006 a carefully choreographed and staged street theatre with no resonance within the wider population at all. For being a dissident is perhaps a lot more 'sexy' and that seems to tie in with the self congratulatory and pastiche development of the idea of a Velvet Revolution led by avant-garde playwrights and culturally 'progressive' forces. “The Belarus Free Theatre successfully performed “Generation Jeans” at the opening day of the Eastern Partnership summit in Prague, which they attended on invitation of Vaclav Havel. A day later the Belarusian group returned home to Minsk together with their friends and colleagues, Czech theatre company “Na Dachu” – a famous underground theatre of Czechoslovakia in the times of communist dictatorship'.”

Yet unlike the Czech Republic in the 70s and 80s the Belarusian regime is not really 'communist'. Nor do most Belarussians have an aching desire to overthrow it his authoritarian populist regime. There is simply not the will to do so and nothing approximating the Solidarity in Poland after 1980. Now it's true that simply because the USA and Western NGOs want to remove Lukashenko but that does not mean that the Free Theatre is necessarily some mere cultural wing of pro-US propaganda. Yet why the productions of avant garde playwrights has anything to do with liberating people in Belarus without US style neoliberal reforms is curious.

Yet the following declaration at the European Partnership Summit following the high profile release of 'political prisoners' by Nikolai Khalezin, the “Generation Jeans” performer and Free Theatre’s creative director, is a bit unclear. Recently, the Foreign Affairs Minister Martynov, has stated in his interview to one of the European periodicals: “There are no political captives in Belarus, but there are friends of the opposition who spend their terms in custody according to economical articles”. But I say that there are politicals in Belarus, and I give my reputation for it. Now we’ll see, which one of us they will believe and whose reputation is worth more – Martynov’s or mine”.

As usual it's very difficult to get a clear picture of the reality in Belarus: are the political prisoners' in Belarus in jail because they keep advocating the removal of Lukashenko in return for being paid by US NGO's who took the model of People Power from the Velvet Revolutions of 1989, the Otpor Movement in Serbia and George Soros. The paradox is that the kind of smear put forward by the Communist dictatorships, that the dissidents were all 'in the pay of the US' is something that actually now does have some truth in it and if opposition is bought then that necessarily compromises their credentials.

The same is as true of the Sumate opposition in Chavez's Venezuela which has continuously attempted to rally together the power of the wealthy to use money and media power to get rid of a leader who the USA sees as a threat to its geopolitical and oil interests in Latin America. Or support the oligarchs in Russia. And what is at stake in Belarus is not just the removal of Lukashenko. It is the import of the "shock therapy" model most Belarusians fear. They prefer not having been plunged into huge poverty as other ex-Soviet states have or other former nations of what was "Eastern Europe" or the "Eastern Bloc". Lukashenko is not democratic but he is genuinely popular as he is seen as Bat'ka, a strong leader that will prevent people being thrown on to the scrapheap of history by being reduced to penury. In Minsk pensioners are not reduced as they have been in Bulgaria or Ukraine to eating food directly out of dustbins.

But as with Iraq, the "shock doctrine" therapy is never talked about by "oppositionists" in Charter 97, a site that censors dissenting comments or which challenge the opposition to spell out its economic policy should they get into power. Constantly, they refuse to discuss it. So much for an Open Society and "transparency". Ironically, when I politely requested what would happen should "regime change" occur in Belarus and whether it would not lead to the massive impoverishment of old people if it copied the US model, I was subjected to Stalinist style abuse and called "mentally ill" for also mentioning Belarus's pivotal position in the Great Game to control pipelines.

None of that features in Cohen's morally simplistic interpretation of Belarus as a "dictatorship" and "rotting Brezhnevian state". Despite the fact it has survived and weathered the 2008 crash better than the neighbouring Baltic States where Milton Friedman's monetarism and neoliberal "reforms" create a debt and property fuelled economy. Cohen claims that, “Nor are they ( the Belarusan State ) any less modern than other forms of government. Both the Free Theatre actors and the organisers of the Charter 97 website, which monitors Belarussian tyranny, told me how sinister they found Lukashenko's new alliances. He is a member of the 21st-century's club of dictators, which, in a break with the patterns of the cold war, brings socialist tyrannies together with the promoters of radical reaction. The alliance of the red and brown, the communistic and fascistic, meant that while Hussein and Milosevic were alive, Lukashenko was their friend. Now he allies with Iran's messianic Islamist dictatorship. As he gets more senile, he picks fights with his former protectors in Moscow and turns towards his new allies for ideas.”

Belarus is not moving towards Russia nor breaking an alliance as he "gets senile". This is nonsense. The man is a teetotaller and active ice hockey player. Recently he has been moving towards the EU. But Lukashenko is not a dictator. He rigs the vote up but not as high as Saakashvili did in Georgia and who is not considered a dictator but a sterling democrat. Essentially Lukashenko is a pragmatist and authoritarian populist who got 80% of the vote in 2006 compared to Saakashvili who received a curiously high 97% of the vote in the the Rose Revolution in 2003. He is not a dictator or "Stalinist" , placed as he was by Polish FM Sikorski in 2005 on The Axis of Evil.

Belarus is not even "communist". Investment is pouring in from the West and Minsk is booming. Though it suffered from the 2008 Crash, it did not fare as badly as the Baltic Republics like Estonia. Partly this was because Lukashenko balanced IMF loans with Russian ones too. The actions against "national minorities" are simply inspired by the Polish government's attempt to get Belarus back into its "sphere of influence" by goading Polish nationalists to stir things up. Most Poles in Belarus barely speak Polish now. A minority do in places like Gomel (Homel) on the border with Poland. There is no need to rationalise Lukashenko's regime and its repression any more than to demonise it as some nightmare Stalinist dictatorship. But the oppositionists are basically hirelings of the USA out to get to get "the best democracy money can buy" and consumerism. They do not care about anybody else but themselves.

Charter 97's website is replete with bored students who have been given Ipods and laptops in return for trying to goad the authorities into repressive measures. It's basically the same tactics of the 1968ers and who crave release from the boredom of Belarus and old fashioned societies. Not least the awful remnant Soviet style parades and kitsch. But any reform in Belarus should come from within gradually and with the EU's encouragement. Nor should Belarus moving towards the EU be tied to NATO entrance. This is unnecessary and a nation as poor as Belarus should not be compelled as Georgia is to spend 70% of its budget on US and Israeli weapons.

Ultimately, the USA cares about Belarus only as it's situated between Poland and Russia and control of the pipelines would be a major gain if Lukashenko was removed. Beltranzgas is a major asset with its refineries that could be grabbed by Western investors. The USA conceals realpoiltik with humanitarian rhetoric but it cares little for ordinary Belarusans. Yet the geopolitics of Poland, a supine client state of the USA that never criticises anything it does, is aligned to getting regime change in Ukraine too, so that Polish influence extends down to the Black Sea as it did during the period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Sixteenth Century.

Belarus is as well known in the West as Albania but as Norman Davies suggests in Europe At War 'the history of this nation ought to be better understood' in the light of the fact that it suffered more deaths than any other nation in World War Two, some 25% of it's total pre-1939 population. But all the messianic guff about Lukashenko being part of an Axis of Evil, as if it were a European version of North Korea or calling him "Another Hitler" will backfire as Lukashenko makes a lot of his anti-Fascist credentials and Belarus' sacrifice in defeating Nazism. The fact the USA is expansionist leads to the claim that the USA is the New Third Reich.

People in Belarus are not duped and brainwashed. They support Lukashenko because in 1993 the Belarusian politicians were immured in corruption as asset stripping began. Lukashenko promised to be the strong man who would put an end to and did. Which is not to say he does not enjoy what A J P Taylor once called the "beer of power". But far less so that Saakashvili. Belarussians saw what was happening in Russia as "shock therapy" decimated the population, killing off 10% of its population in the 1990s, and decided to back Lukashenko who is genuinely popular according even to Timothy Garton Ash who predictably backed the staged and fake "Denim Revolution" of 2006.

Yet the problem is that the "oppositionists" are really after the slice of the privatisation cake that would come. Really, the best solution should be that Belarus reforms gradually, retains the social security net and Lukashenko offered trade ties with the EU in return for greater liberties. The "oppositionists" in Belarus are not popular because most ordinary people there understand that the NGO's and Charter 97 are paid by the US NED to protest. That annoys people who resent the USA meddling in their nation state. It's counter-productive and will not bring about more freedom.

One thing that Cohen gets right is many could not even place Belarus on a map. The only history of Belarus available is Jan Zaprudnik's Belarus: At A Crossroads in History which ends the story in 1993, or Stewart Parker's far too laudatory The Last Soviet Republic which appears as though it could have been written by the Belarusan Foreign Office in London.

If it is a Red-Brown Alliance that Cohen, who is often very good indeed, wants to investigate, then he should try the alliance between, on the one hand, old Stalinists and Trotskyists, and, on the other, the old hired help of apartheid South Africa and Pinochet's Chile, in support of his beloved never-ending global war to exactly the ends set out by Naylor: both social and economic libertinism and decadence, even at the barrel of a gun, and with all the internal repressiveness that both of them really entail in order to maintain their godless, rootless, borderless, metrosexual globalism.