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Which would be the most important factor for success – the internal opposition or the outside pressure?
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Vashkevich: I think that these two processes should work in parallel. Opposition forces must become united and consolidated. When the EU and the international community see the rise of the democratic opposition, they will know that victory is possible.
Tags: Boris Tashkov, Committee for Free Democratic and Independent Belarus, Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, Mikhail Vashkevich, dissident, USSR, Gulag
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http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=124082
Belarus ordered the closure of the office of the Europe's top rights watchdog OSCE in Minsk on 31 December 2010. The OSCE has been sharply critical of the December re-election of Belarusian President Lukashenko. EPA/BGNES
The Sofia-based Committee for Free, Democratic, and Independent Belarus has expressed its readiness to serve as an embassy for the Balkan countries for the "government of national salvation" formed by the Belarusian opposition.
In an interview for Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) Mikhail Vashkevich, a Belarusian dissident, writer and journalist living in exile in Bulgaria since 1996, and Boris Tashkov, head of the Committee, said they denounced the violence that the Belarusian regime used to disperse a 40 000 opposition rally in Minsk protesting the rigged elections on December 19, 2010, which gave the incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko a fourth term.
"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," Vashkevich said.
The Belarusian presidential elections at the end of December 2010 were widely criticized by the EU, the USA, and the international community because of wide-spread rigging, fraud, and violence.
Vashkevich and Tashkov have urged the EU and NATO and their member states to take much more active measures against the Lukashenko regime in Belarus. They declared that Lukashenko relies explicitly on backing from Russian leadership in the Kremlin, and his regime cannot survive without Moscow's support.
"I hope that these last presidential elections in Belarus have shown to the EU and to the international community that Lukashenko's regime has no future in the 21st century, that it is an anomaly. It is really important for the international community to support the democratization of Belarus. Belarus must join the EU and the ranks of democratic countries. We will work with the internal opposition in Belarus to reach that goal... When the EU and the international community see the rise of the democratic opposition, they will know that victory is possible," Vashkevich said.
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Vashkevich fled to Bulgaria in 1996 after an attempt was made on his life in Minsk where he was the founder of the Christian-Democratic Union of Belarus in 1993. Back in the 1980s, Vashkevich spent 4 years in a Gulag labor camp in the Soviet Union for his dissenting publications on charges of ties with the "imperialist west."
Novinite.com's Interview with Vashkevich and Tashkov on the situation in Belarus READ HERE
Tags: Gulag, USSR, dissident, Mikhail Vashkevich, Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus, Committee for Free Democratic and Independent Belarus, Boris Tashkov
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=124118 Belarus under Lukashenko: Bright Light on the Dniepe* - Views on BG | January 13, 2011, Thursday
Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko holds a press conference in Minsk, Belarus, 20 December 2010. EPA/BGNES
From The New Statesman - By Neil Clark - Original title: "Bright Light on the Dniepe"
Little-known and often misreported, Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko is a well-kept secret — a booming country that blends the best of modern life with a controlled economy.
A woman sits bolt upright in the middle of the night. She jumps out of bed and rushes to the bathroom to look in the medicine cabinet. Then, she runs into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. Finally, she dashes to the window and looks out into the street.
Relieved, she returns to the bedroom. Her husband asks, "What's wrong with you?"
"I had a terrible nightmare," she says. "I dreamed we could still afford to buy medicine, that the refrigerator was absolutely full, and that the streets were safe and clean. I also dreamed that you had a job, that we could afford to pay our gas and electricity bills."
"How is that a nightmare?" asks her husband.
The woman shakes her head. "I thought the communists were back in power."
This Bulgarian joke, as told by Maria Todorova in the Guardian and now doing the rounds across eastern Europe, doesn't work here in Minsk. This is a capital city where the streets are safe and clean, where ordinary people can still afford to buy medicine and basic foodstuffs and where the unemployment rate is less than 1 per cent. It's the side of Belarus you won't read much about. After last month's presidential elections - in which Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected to serve a fourth term with almost 80 per cent of the vote - the arrest of opposition candidates and hundreds of their supporters led to the reappearance of the old "last dictatorship in Europe" headlines. But shocking as the scenes of police beating protesters were, it would be a mistake to equate Belarus with Burma, or Lukashenko with Joseph Stalin.
Lukashenko's rule is unquestionably authoritarian, as he has conceded, but his policies, which combine aspects of the old communist system - social security and full employment - with a mixed economy and greater personal freedoms than existed in the days of the Soviet Union, have proved hugely popular with the majority of ordinary Belarusians, as his election results testify.
While other former Soviet republics rushed to embrace capitalism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, privatising their state-owned enterprises and removing subsidies to industry and agriculture, Belarus kept the old collectivist flame alive. My guidebook describes it as a country "so unspoilt by the trappings of western materialism that it's very easy to feel a sense of having slipped into another time and dimension". Yet even here - a country where roughly 80 per cent of the economy is nationalised and statues of Lenin still line the streets - times are changing. Pressure from the IMF and Russia and a desire to court the European Union, among other reasons, have led Belarus to embark on a major privatisation programme of its own. Ninety per cent of state-owned businesses have been earmarked for sale. Does the move mark the de facto end of Europe's last socialist planned economy?
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During a press conference at Belarus 's wonderfully retro ministry of economy, where the BBC could quite happily have filmed the Life on Mars series, Nikolai Snopkov, the minister in charge of the department, denies that his country is changing course. "All the successful economic systems in the world are mixed systems. We are committed to combining the principle of the free market with social justice. The economy is not for itself: it has a human purpose." Asked if Belarus will roll back the state, he answers with a resounding "nyet".
Ukrainian rhapsody
Afterwards, we are taken to see one of the country's industrial gems - the enormous Belarusian Autoworks (BelAZ) factory in Zhodino. BelAZ, which launched in 1948, employs 12,000 people, and is the biggest producer of mining dump trucks in the world.
Our guide Natalia proudly escorts us round the factory museum, with its scale models of BelAZ vehicles. There is a photograph of a beaming Hugo Chávez, a strong ally of Lukashenko (he recently said that Venezuela would supply Belarus with oil for the next 200 years), driving a BelAZ truck. This is more than just a company - it's an extended family. There is a sanatorium for the workers, two sports and fitness centres, and a cultural centre where a theatre collective plays. Such enterprises used to be common in eastern Europe before 1989 - but economic reform put a stop to all that.
On our return to Minsk, we find the bars and cafés full of well-dressed young people. Aggression and public displays of drunkenness are refreshingly absent from the streets. Outside the state opera (cheapest tickets US), we meet an Irish restaurant owner who has emigrated to Belarus. "This is the place," he says. "The economy is booming and there's a real vibe. My son and I went to Ukraine recently and everyone was saying to us: 'Can we have the Belarus president in charge here for a year?'"
It's not difficult to see why. Unlike Ukraine and Russia, Belarus 's economy is not dominated by billionaire oligarchs. There is no underclass: according to UN figures, Belarus has one of the lowest levels of social inequality in the world. Lukashenko wins elections not through fear, but because he has delivered social protection and rising standards of living. Growth now stands at 7 per cent.
The danger, some feel, is that a move towards a more market-oriented economy will destroy these achievements, and leave Belarusians sharing the same bitter-sweet jokes as their fellow eastern Europeans.
Tags: Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus, Ukraine
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