Lukashenko: a nasty side-effect of Belarusaitis

By Edward Lucas

Date: 13/10/05

Belarusaitis used to be a rare affliction. One symptom is visiting Minsk frequently, a clean and spacious city, but not distinguished by its aesthetic attraction, to put it mildly. Another is a love of inflicting obscure details of Belarussian history on unsuspecting people.

Did you know that there used to be two rival Belarussian governments-in-exile? One dates from 1918 and the other - which has now folded - from 1944". As my eyes light up and start swivelling, my interlocutors look increasingly puzzled and start edging away.

That's just embarrassing. But a more dangerous symptom is wishful thinking about the chances for political change. I know: I was so fed up with the bureaucratic, corrupt regime of Vyacheslav Kebich that I longed for Alexander Lukashenko to win the presidential elections in 1994. To my lasting embarrassment, I even wrote favourably about him in The Economist. A populist with a strong anti-corruption message, who genuinely engaged with people when he campaigned, seemed a welcome breath of fresh air.

It soon became clear that things were going wrong. A couple of years later I interviewed the president, when Ford opened a car plant outside Minsk (they soon had to close it). His answers were so erratic and off-the-point that it was hard to fit them into the article. Even the bits I could use didn't make it into print: The Economist crunched them into the anonymous "Some top Belarussians think this [the plant] is the start of something big". His press people, who had been expecting a cover-story, have never allowed me near him since.

Now I worry that other people have Belarusaitis worse than me. A country that used to be a black hole is now attracting a lot of Western interest. This chiefly manifests itself in a rich programme of seminars and handouts for Belarussian opposition organisations. The aim is to present a real challenge to the Lukashenko regime in the elections next year.

It's easy to see why excitement is growing. The opposition has agreed on a single candidate, the multilingual physicist Alexander Milinkevic. When I met him a few years ago I found him not just clever and honest, but sane and sensible - which is more than can be said for many of the chancers, scroungers, losers and nutters who have made up much of the Belarussian opposition in the past.

He faces formidable obstacles - and not just that the election campaign and count will be rigged against him. Another is the Belarusaitis of his own foreign supporters. What many Westerners fail to realise is that support for Lukashenko and a close alliance with Russia, plus suspicion towards Poland, the West and the opposition are not just the product of the regime's propaganda, but also the sincere feelings of a large chunk of the population. There is evidence to show that these feelings are eroding (for which three cheers) but they are still strong.

The Belarusaitis-driven enthusiasm of Milinkevic's Western supporters threatens his appeal to potential voters at home. The regime is longing to present him as the representative of a Polish fifth-column that wants to bring Belarus under the cultural political and economic domination of the West: that is to say joining not just the EU but Nato, fighting in Iraq, sponsoring Chechen terrorism and being an al-Qaeda target (no it isn't logical, but that's never bothered them). Plus he supposedly wants to sell the country to foreign speculators. Which (caricatures aside) is pretty much what Belarus needs. But saying it loudly won't help the good guys win.

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

Author reports on growing interest in the political situation in Belarus well ahead of the Presidential elections, scheduled for September 2006.