http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gartonash23mar23,0,1894004.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
>From the Los Angeles Times
Spinning Belarus
Can hyping a peoples' 'revolution' in Minsk make it so?
By Timothy Garton Ash
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is professor of European studies at Oxford University.
March 23, 2006
WHAT'S happening in Belarus this week is a contest over the definition, even the very nature, of reality. In the aftermath of Sunday's presidential elections, the spokespeople and media of each side claim a certain reality, and in doing so, their purpose is to create it.
As Andrew Wilson demonstrates in his excellent book "Virtual Politics," the Belarus of President Alexander Lukashenko is an example of a new type of post-Soviet regime that retains power by what Wilson calls "faking democracy."
At least as important as the KGB (still called that in Belarus) and the other organs of state power that arrest, intimidate or otherwise get rid of opposition leaders are the "political technologists" — private agencies with names such as Nikkolo-M and Image-Kontakt. They devise Machiavellian election strategies that make North American or West European spin doctors look genteel.
Then a group of election monitors from the former Soviet Union, headed by a former Russian interior minister, declares the resulting elections "free, open and transparent." Black is white; or rather, in the post-Soviet version, dark gray is light gray. Anything but orange.
On the other side, opposition leaders, helped by European and American advisors, work to create an inspiring narrative of a nation rising up to free itself from the dictatorial yoke. In the Internet age, you can follow this narrative on websites such as that of the Charter 97 group, founded in conscious tribute to the Czechoslovak Charter 77 movement. On http://www.charter97.org you have, minute by minute, a story of "dozens of thousands" of demonstrators defying snow, ice and the police on election night. A report of a "10,000-strong column" grew to 40,000 (an estimate far larger than that given by any foreign journalist) by 4:05 the next morning.
"Today we are born in a different country — a more courageous and free country," declared the lead post later that morning, calling for people to reassemble in October Square. "Call your relatives, friends, colleagues; come with your families. We are the majority, and we shall win!"
But they are not the majority. Most independent observers agree that these elections were very far from free and fair, and that Lukashenko is unlikely in reality to have received his claimed 82.6% of the vote on a 92.6% turnout. Yet most also believe that the elusive, contested reality of votes actually cast for him was probably well above 50%.
And that's not just the snap impression of visiting journalists. The Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexiyevich, for example, who calls Lukashenko a dictator whose time has passed, also observes: "A large percentage of people in this society agree with what is taking place in the country. It means they can earn a living somewhere; there is some quota for them in institutions of higher learning; there is still some education and healthcare free of charge."
Of course, we cannot know how the majority would have voted if opposition leaders had had equal access to an independent mass media, which they did not. So instead, they are trying to create a new kind of "people power" majority with bodies on the streets, in the spirit of President Andrew Jackson: "One man with courage makes a majority." And it takes courage to keep turning out on the streets of Minsk.
Still, at this writing, it looks as if the demonstrators are not succeeding, unlike their Ukrainian, Georgian and Serbian predecessors. The number of demonstrators seems to have diminished day by day, not grown in Ukrainian orange-style. A couple of hundred protesters are reportedly camping out at October Square, despite police harassment, and another mass rally has been called for Sunday. But the story in the international media is already "the revolution that wasn't." Perhaps it will still happen. Perhaps Lukashenko is crowing too soon that Belarus has resisted "the virus of color revolution." But his statement, too, is about creating reality.
By this stage, some readers may suspect that I've been infected with a nasty bout of postmodern relativism. Not at all. And there is no moral equivalence between Lukashenko and his opponents. But I insist that it is precisely those of us who care most about the spread of freedom [meaning what? --JD] through Europe who must be most careful not to confuse our wishes with reality.
When, for example, the website of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (www.rferl.org) reports the Belarus story under a continuing headline "Overcoming Fear," I must point out that a question mark is missing. In a contest of virtual or potential realities, there's still an underlying bedrock of facts, however difficult to find, and we must stick to those facts. There are so many, and only so many, people locked up. There are so many, and only so many, bodies on the streets.
THREE MAJOR LINES of conflict meet in the Belarusian fulcrum. There's the line between democracy and dictatorship, which post-Soviet political technologists like Nikkolo-M have make it their business to obscure; there's the clash of the advancing liberal empires of the West — the European Union and American-led NATO — with the retreating empire of Russia; and there's the ongoing argument about the virtues of more free-market or "neoliberal" economies as against more statist or planned models.
There are many reasons for the different paths followed by Belarus' Western and Eastern neighbors since the end of the Cold War — the Polish way and the Russian way — but one of the most fundamental is this: The Poles wanted to join the European Union, and the European Union made it clear the Poles could join only if they met certain standards regarding democracy, the rule of law, a market economy and so forth.
Now it's the Poles — and Slovaks, Czechs, Lithuanians and other recently self-liberated Europeans — who, as new members of the EU, are saying that more must be done to sustain the cause of freedom in places such as Belarus. Besides direct support to independent media, civil society and the democratic opposition, and pressuring the country's leaders, the most important thing the West — and Europe in particular — can do is continue to offer a longterm perspective.
-- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles