Brain gym at end of universe is worth working out

By Edward Lucas

Date: 09/03/06

The British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG) disagrees with my deepest convictions about Eastern Europe. That's why I like it.

The group's website (bhhrg.org) is a parallel universe where everything is the mirror image of reality: economic reform was a disaster that plunged the countries of Eastern Europe into poverty; the resulting demographic dip is mass murder by shock therapy. Most of the ex-captive nations have become sham democracies, run by corrupt elites in thrall to Washington and Brussels. Anyone who contests the new hegemony is demonised by the slavish western media (chief culprit: The Economist). And so on.

Many regard the BHHRG as mad, bad, sad or all three. Its name does give a perhaps misleadingly grand impression, given that it is run by three people out of a couple of rooms in Oxford. Its activists are vituperative and hyper-prickly. Their reports, though elaborately sourced and full of eye-witness accounts, often contain remarkable errors, exaggerations and leaps of logic. To take one small example, a recent report on Estonia asserted grandly that the country's reputation as an internet paradise was a myth. The only evidence was that the BHHRG's writer had not been able to get his laptop online. The group's attempts to minimise the nastiness of Alexander Lukashenko or Transdniestria's Igor Smirnov verge on the quixotic. A recent piece attacking my friend Radek Sikorski, now Poland's defence minister, was paranoid and vicious.

But lots of people that I agree with make mistakes and personal attacks while overstating their arguments and credentials. What I like about the BHHRG is that it forces me to think about why I believe what I do and to consider aspects of the post-Communist world that I might otherwise be tempted to sideline.

Since the collapse of ideological Communism, I have rather missed having an alternative world view to wrestle with. It's not much fun arguing with anti-Semitic kooks, nationalist bigots, or Soviet revivalists because their arguments ("we're the master race", "planned economies are better" etc) are so stupid. The BHHRG is wrong. But it is not stupid. It doesn't dislike capitalism or democracy (and it is not, despite what some of its critics say, funded by the people it defends). It just poses good questions.

Take double standards. Are the bad guys really as bad as they are commonly portrayed? Western journalists and politicians tend to use every stick we can find to beat, for example, the regimes in Belarus and Transdniestria. We tend to be rather more forgiving when it comes to problems elsewhere. The BHHRG's accounts of imperfections and irregularities observed at elections in the Baltic states or Poland are troubling.

On foreign policy, it is a good exercise for an Atlanticist like me to work out counter-arguments to its view about America and the Iraq war. Did America bribe and bully weak countries into supporting it? Not quite. But I'd have to concede that America's robust efforts to gain support before the war haven't been matched by gratitude later.

There are also very fair questions about economics. Why have the gains of globalisation in the past 15 years been so skewed? Is emigration from the region a sign of failure?

The weakness in all this is the counterfactual: it's hard to see how a world run on BHHRG principles of isolationism and home-spun economics would work. And it's hard to see the region being richer and safer without EU and NATO membership and influence. Reading the BHHRG's material may not change your mind. But it should sharpen it.

• Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Comment feature on the work of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG) on human rights issues in Central and Eastern Europe.

British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG): Homepage http://www.bhhrg.org/

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