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How did Mr. Vashkevich get involved in politics in Belarus?
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You two are the major figures in the Sofia-based Committee for Free, Democratic, and Independent Belarus. How did such an NGO even come into being in Bulgaria?
Tashkov: Yes, I am the chair of the committee because I am a Bulgarian citizen, and Mikhail Vashkevich is the deputy chair. The Committee for Free, Democratic and Independent Belarus started as a result of Vashkevich's arrest by the Bulgarian police in December 2003 became his permit to stay in the country had expired.
He was arrested and kept in the facility for illegal aliens in Sofia for 37 days in order to prepare him for extradition from the country. This was at the order of Bulgaria's former Chief Prosecutor Nikola Filchev.
I together with a number of other people learned that there was a Belarusian man, who was a political immigrant and was about to be expelled, and we started a campaign to save him from extradition. After he was released in 2004, on his 60th birthday in September 2004, we got together to found this Committee for Free, Democratic and Independent Belarus, which I chaired because he did not have a Bulgarian address at the time. We received legal support from the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee.
What is your main goal and reason for existence as an organization?
Tashkov: We are outright opponents to dictatorial regimes and illegally elected political leaders. We are against the polices of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and his illegal election. The latest example for that was the mass fraud during the December 19, 2010, presidential elections in Belarus, with which he won a fourth term.
Vashkevich: We disseminate information from Bulgaria to try to help the democratization process in Belarus. We support the Belarusian opposition and Andrey Sannikov and the government of national salvation that he founded on the election night in December 2010, on the Independence Square in Minsk.
We would like to be its representatives in Bulgaria and in the Balkans. We got in touch with the current opposition leaders in Belarus because we hold the same views. We will offer them to act as their embassy in Bulgaria and the region.
Why? Because the existing Belarusian Embassy in Bulgaria does not have a single Belarusian staff member, they are all Russians there, and there is no way they can represent the interests of Belarus and the Belarussian people. I am often mistaken for a Russian here but I am a Belarusian. We are going to offer them to act as their embassy.
Our job is to stop Lukashenko and the Kremlin. Because the Kremlin supports Lukashenko, and they are leading Belarus towards a civil war!
Take the events that occurred in December 2010, after the elections, on the Independence Square in Minsk there were 2 000 soldiers beating the protesters. What were these soldiers? These were soldiers from the city of Smolensk in Russia. There is no way Belarusian soldiers could beat there own people so severely.
That is why every time Lukashenko needs to break up protest he rallies, he summons the OMON, the special purpose police units, as well as internal security troops from Russia. If it hadn't been for Russia's backing Lukashenko would have been chased away from Belarus a long time ago.
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Is this political violence the main reason to term Lukashenko's rule in Belarus dictatorial?
Tashkov: Lukashenko has taken part in three elections in Belarus not counting the one in December 2010, and all have been won by election rigging.
In December 1991, Stanislav Shushkevich, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus, met with Boris Yeltsin of Russia and Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine in the Belavezhskaya forest in Belarus to formally declare the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In the 1994 elections that Lukashenko won there were several candidates – including Shushkevich and Vyachaslau Kebich. Shushkevich, who was the former communist leader of Belarus and was the president of independent Belarus in 1991-1994, turned out to be a much more democratic man than Lukashenko. Another candidate was count Alexander Pruszyński who arrived back after living as immigrant in Canada.
By the way, Canada is the seat of the government in exile of the Belarusian National Republic – a state of Belarus founded immediately after the October revolution in the Russian Empire in 1917 as an independent nation that broke away from the Russian Empire.
It existed in 1918-1919, before it was crushed by the Red Army, after the Red Army triumphed against the counter revolutionary forces of Wrangel, Kolchak, and Denikin in the Russian Civil War.
The Belarusian National Republic has had governments in exile ever since, its current Prime Minister is Ivonka Survilla. That is why, in 1990-1, when the former Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic became independent it could not use the same name, and was named simply the Republic of Belarus.
Lukashenko won the 1994 thanks to extreme populism. This is not surprising, we in Bulgaria know from the 20-year history of the new Bulgarian democracy that populism is a natural tool. Back then Lukashenko promised free state services of all kind to the people, higher pensions. But his economy remains a closed one, he does not have the international contacts that Belarus would have if it had free and democratic elections recognized by the 27 member states of the EU.
Because the natural place for Belarus is in the EU. This country cannot be on the eastern border of the EU, the eastern border of the EU must be the border between Belarus and Russia.
Of course, in 1994, Lukashenko also won the elections thanks to the extreme support that he got from the KGB in Belarus.
How did Mr. Vashkevich get involved in politics in Belarus?
Tashkov: After his failed bid in the elections, count Pruszynski continued his political activity in Belarus. He selected journalist Mihail Vashkevich, a very honest and decent man dedicated to democracy, as his secretary.
Back in 1993, Vashkevich founded in Belarus the Christian-Democratic Union of Belarus.
Because of his positions and views before 1990, Vashkevich spend four years in a GULAG camp in the Soviet Union, in the Ivatsevichy camp in Belarus – in 1986-1988 and 1988-1989.
Vashkevich: I was released only by Gorbachev at the end of the perestroika.
Tashkov: The treatment that he got there as a political prisoner was extremely harsh, his legs were broken in the beatings.
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There is another, rather interesting story on the side here. It is there that Vashkevich met many political prisoners, including a man who told him that the Lenin body lying today in the Moscow mausoleum does not belong to the actual Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, but to a political prisoner in Siberia who was a Lenin look-alike.
This happened because in 1941, with the advance of the German army in World War II, the Soviet authorities took Lenin's body out of the mausoleum, they failed to provide the necessary conservation conditions and the body disintegrated, and they burned it. Yet, in order to maintain this symbol of the Soviet Union, Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of the Soviet security apparatus under Stalin decided to get this prisoner who looked 100% like Lenin, to kill him with an injection and to place his body in the mausoleum in downtown Moscow.
Vashkevich even wrote an article entitled "Lenin Is Not Lenin" that was published by the Bulgarian daily 24 Chasa.
As a result of his populism and backing from Moscow, Lukashenko was elected President of Belarus in 1994. He subsequently dissolved the Belarusian Parliament, the so called Saziv.
Pruszynski and Vashkevich were among those who worked in favor of the Parliament but the actually elected deputies were ousted.
Thus, in 1994-1996 Vashkevich was arrested several times for political reasons, spending 1-2 weeks in jail each time, including in April 1996 when the opposition staged a big rally to mark the tenth year since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The rally was brutally suppressed, and to this day international organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch point it out as an example of blatant police brutality in Europe.
After he was released, a month later, in May 1996 Vashkevich was having dinner in a friend's home in Minsk when he was shot at from a neighboring building. Luckily, the bullet missed, everybody went on the floor, and he managed to leave the building. This is when he made the hard decision to emigrate fearing next time he would not be so lucky.
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