Minsk Saturday

The news story arrived Saturday, showing President Lukashenko's willingness to use the iron fist that wasn't employed in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution.

Riot police dispersed a fresh challenge to President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko on Saturday, blocking thousands of antigovernment demonstrators from reaching the central square in the capital and later arresting a top opposition leader ...

The turnout on Saturday in the face of police violence suggested that the opposition had far more support than Mr. Lukashenko had conceded in his derisive public remarks.

The protesters, who have modeled their effort in part after freedom movements against Communist or post-Soviet governments in Poland, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere, were young and old, men and women. They called loudly for a new way of life, free of state repression and with integration with the West, which Mr. Lukashenko loathes.

With even critics of the current Belarussian regime saying President Lukashenko could have been re-elected if the election had been "free and fair," if only based on his rural support, I do wonder what a new election would do. To make the election free and fair, the country needs a free press (on BBC Sunday, an election monitor said this was the main reason the election wasn't "free and fair": the opposition couldn't get its message out). A free press doesn't appear overnight. And when Lukashenko's three challengers split 17 percent of the vote, with one of these candidates preaching a platform similar to the president's, I do wonder what the cost of a national election would be. At least elsewhere, national elections are extremely expensive. If that's the price of winning a free press, it would be worth it. Right now, I can't see any other goal. It wouldn't be a popular revolution, or a democratic revolution, if a group, however vocal and urban, seized power with less than 50 percent of the vote. The votes of the majority were miscounted in Ukraine in 2004. TO have a similar situation in Belarus, either the votes were mistallied on a much larger scale, or people felt afraid to voice their true opinion in the polling stations. Those overseeing the election, 500 people from 38 countires, say:

The vote count proved highly problematic, with observers assessing it negatively in a large number of counts witnessed. In a number of instances, the results were completed in pencil, and the majority of observers were prevented from standing close enough to see the marks on the ballot.

Over 30 per cent of voters cast their ballot during five days of early voting. Lack of security provisions for the ballot box increased the possibility of fraud. The mission also received a number of reports that managers and directors pressured staff to vote early.

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A Climate of Fear

Now it's a news story -- Belarus protest ends in police action -- and now I don't find it on the NY Time's front webpage. Go figure.

The reporter Chivers again says the election was "rigged," which is a word I take to mean ballots were incorrectly counted, but again his only defense of this word is somewhat vague:

International observers have said the vote was neither free nor fair. The United States has condemned both Mr. Lukashenko and the election and called for a new vote, saying the campaign was conducted by a dictator in a climate of fear.

"Climate of fear." Where do I remember that? Before the War in Iraq, in those final few days, I remember the White House trotting out every possible scenario of doom and gloom, even one that had Saddam, always Saddam, flying model airplanes or some such nonsense over Florida from Cuba or some silly thing, all this so he could dump anthrax or Weapons of Mass Destruction on an unsuspecting populace of retirees and tax payers. Model airplanes, people. That's what got us banging the drums in the March to Baghdad. And Rummy still hasn't even found one little remote-controled plane he can show the American people.

The thing that never made sense to me is, we won't as a nation be told by anyone else what we're going to do. We will act unilaterally. We won't let anyone tell us what to do. But when explaining this unilateral action, especially after no WMDs are found, the insurgency flares and everything is going so wrong, the first thing we will say is, Well, our intelligence may have been flawed (never wrong, just flawed), but remember, this was the same intelligence the Germans had, and the French, and the British. So, to recap: we'll go it alone, but when things go wrong, we'll blame your intelligence. If you're about personal responsibility, I wonder how you overlook that. All you will find in DC these days is the logic of a thirteen year-old boy who wants to explain away his mistakes, no matter the holes in logic.

Oy-yoi-yoi.

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More Belarus, Bad Journalism

It seems the NY Times and the BBC, the two places where I've been getting most of my news on the situation in Belarus, had scheduled a revolution into their editorial calendar, and so they're going to provide one to their readers no matter what. I don't agree with the front-page coverage the Times is giving the ongoing protest in Minsk, which currently boasts about 300 people in the main public square. It's coverage that describes people expecting something to happen, not events actually happening. It is a forecast, not news. And it's appearing every day on the front page.

In today's dispatch, you'll find is this paragraph, which the reporter, C.J. Chivers, apparently believes isn't third-rate journalism:

Since a rigged presidential election on March 19, the capital of Belarus has seen a protest like none in 12 years of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko's autocratic grip.

"Rigged" is not defined in the story, and a support of the word "autocratic" must be gleaned from the threat of bloodshed that has not yet come.

At any moment, the demonstrators said, they expected the police to rush forward, beat them with clubs and drag them off to the detention cells. And then their protest would end in blood.

Chivers tries to further justify the relevance for this news story with a quote from Aleksandr Milinkevich, the opposition leader:

To the extent that this is a revolution, Mr. Milinkevich often says, it is a revolution not on the streets but in the mind.

So this is a story about bloodshed that's about to happen, and a revolution that's located in the mind. "The nation of Belarus revolted against their autocratic leader today, though because it was a revolution of the mind, everyone stayed home and telepathically protested from there."

Something tells me the editors of the New York Times, that grand old lady of print, that tired woman in need of the rest home, wouldn't allow a news story about 300 American protestors to be inflated into an imminent White House crack-down and a revolution of the mind. Nor would they allow "rigged" and "autocrat" to be so easily bandied around if they referred to American politics, though certainly some word argue that those words could just as easily be applied to current political events.

He stood in the darkness, shifting his weight from one cold foot to the other, waiting for whatever comes next.

I'll be waiting for the news too. Until then, I'll be reading something else in my paper.

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The Last Dictator

Like many Americans -- strike that, most Americans -- I'm good at buying into the echo chamber. Let Senator John McCain call Belarus' Aleksandr Lukashenko "the last dictator in Europe," let the talking heads repeat that phrase a thousand times on CNN and Fox, let it go into every newspaper description of the man that follows, and I will likely say, whenever talking about the Belarussian President, "You know, the last dictator in Europe."

But more and more of late, I've found myself -- dear god help me -- siding with Lukashenko. I don't know enough to voice an opinion on the matter. That should be stated upfront, if only to give me room to scream into the wind. But let's look at the criticism of the recent election, which has been viewed as undemocratic by the United States and the EU, both of whom would like to see a new ballot go before the Belarussian people. What are their problems with Belarus?

* Lukashenko controls the press. The opposition can't get its message out. Meanwhile, Ralph Nadar can't get invited to a presidential debate to save the life of a passing motorist in a Corvair. Same in California. A couple elections back, the Green Party wasn't invited to any of the debates between incumbent Gray Davis or his Republican challenger. Democracy starts and stops with preserving the status quo in America. Meanwhile, the right and the left move toward the middle, trying to shout the joys of democracy from the head of the same pin.

* Lukashenko opened the polls for five days prior to the Sunday balloting, making it difficult for election observers to verify the sanctity of the ballot. How is this any different than absentee ballots in America? And when people in Ohio, at least the poor sections of the state, complain of difficulties voting, some of them burdensome enough to make them walk away without casting a ballot, perhaps America should be looking at ways to make voting easier. God knows we're already moving in the direction of making voter fraud easier. By which I mean, dear god why, when your laptop crashes every other day, do you want to make Thomas Jefferson roll over in his grave by telling me there are reasons to use electronic voting machines?

In parts of Iowa, people voting straight Democrat on their last presidential ballot got their votes automatically tallied for the Libertarians. I like the Libertarians. I wish the party well. But there has to be another way.

Here you'll find almost 4,000 more votes in Ohio incorrectly counted for President Bush.

The list goes on. Over a thousand glitches. And all of this would be only frustrating if the CEO of Diebold, the largest manufacturer of voting machines in America, didn't say, prior to Election 2004, that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." As we say here, oy-yoi-yoi.

* But hey, Lukashenko, that dictator, he cracks down on dissent. Opposition activists are being arrested and given prison sentences, just for protesting in the name of Democracy. This might explain the dwindling number of protestors in Minsk (they've fallen from 10,000 election night, to a couple hundred today (though if a couple thousand people walking the streets suggests there's a desire for revolution, don't all the protests against the War in Iraq and Bush's policies suggest revolutionary fever is wild in America too?)).

Lukashenko needs to allow opposition newspapers to exist. He needs to foster a society that allows free speech and gives media opportunities to his opponents. But President Bush, you are not one to speak about the glories of a free press. You have trampled on the press at every turn, closing doors, saying you'd rather talk to the people directly, and insisting, in recent days, that the good things in Iraq need to be reported, as if that's how the news, you silly man, ever works. When Florida's vote was deadlocked in Election 2000, should we have all clapped ourselves on the back because 49 other states got through the election just fine? Was it needless agitating to fret over Florida? Should we have just looked the other way? Focused on the positive? Good is judged on the depths of its failures, not the highs of its successes. You don't build a house without doors or windows and then stand back and say, "But gee golly gee, that's a beauty of a roof!"

Oh. Fish in a barrel with this man. During President Bush's reign of error, we've seen the use of "free-speech" zones, not exactly the type of thing to encourage dissent. I go to The American Conservative for support here, if only to show how even conservatives wonder how anyone can support this guy:

A recent St. Petersburg Times editorial noted, “At a Bush rally at Legends Field in 2001, three demonstrators—two of whom were grandmothers—were arrested for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the designated (free speech) zone. And last year, seven protesters were arrested when Bush came to a rally at the USF Sun Dome. They had refused to be cordoned off into a protest zone hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome.” One of the arrested protesters was a 62-year-old man holding up a sign, “War is good business. Invest your sons.” The seven were charged with trespassing, “obstructing without violence and disorderly conduct.”

And lest you cry "Liberal!" in a crowded room (proving perhaps that you are partisan to the very last, unable to criticize any sitting President of your own party, regardless of his crimes and misdemeanors), The American Conservative continues:

"... federal attacks on freedom of speech should raise grave concerns to anyone worried about the First Amendment or about how a future liberal Democratic president such as Hillary Clinton might exploit the precedents that Bush is setting."

Used to be President Nixon had to look out his limo window and see all the people lining the streets protesting his policies. Now President Bush has eliminated all that, perhaps because a blow to his morale and self-esteem might be considered aiding the terrorists and therefore a threat to our national security.

I don't know. I'll call for a new election in Belarus. But you'll have to give me one in America too.

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Belarus to restrict marriage agencies

In Belarus, where the state controls 80 percent of all business and the country is led by "Europe's last dictator," a new law has been passed requiring models -- or clothing demonstrators, as they're known by their government labor records -- to be citizens of Belarus. If they're not, they can't appear on a billboard, tv commercial or in a newspaper or magazine ad inside the country.

The law requiring a model to prove her citizenship was passed in April, after President Aleksander Lukashenko fretted over the mushrooming presence of Cindy Crawfords and Kate Mosses last year.

I always imagined Belarus would be the next major source of internet-arranged marriages, if its borders ever became more open. But in the immediate future at least, it looks like less marriages will be brokered out of Ukraine's northern neighbor.

A new law passed by the lower house of Parliament last week, for example, would impose restrictions on Internet dating and marriage agencies, especially those catering to foreigners. It would also restrict college students from studying abroad without permission from the Education Ministry.

The rest of this article can be found in the New York Times.

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