In Belarus, expecting to lose, then win

By Steven Lee Myers The New York Times
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2006

MINSK, Belarus On March 19, Alexander Milinkevich will not be elected the next president of Belarus. He campaigns anyway, but with something else in mind. Through the winter he has traveled from city to city in clattering rented vans, meeting would-be voters in the bleak cold, gathering signatures and speaking about the social, economic and, above all, political neuroses that afflict this small nation at the eastern edge of a new Europe.

"It is impossible to win at the elections, because there are no elections," Milinkevich said in a dim, three-room apartment in Minsk back in October. "Nobody counts the votes."

Milinkevich had just been selected, narrowly, during a congress of democratic opposition leaders to serve as a unified candidate against the country's authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, a former collective-farm boss who, over nearly 12 years in power, has defined democracy to mean not the people's choice but the people's acclamation—orchestrated by his government, including the ubiquitous security services, and enforced by a pervasive sense of fear.

"We go into these elections not because we believe in their fairness, but because this is a chance to go to the people, to conduct a campaign door to door," Milinkevich explained through an interpreter. "I will not say that at every door people will become less fearful immediately. But very many people, when they see others who are not afraid, who dare to tell the truth, they will start to have more courage."

Belarus, with about 10 million people, is a new nation and, even in the European mind, an obscure one. The country's fate has rarely been more than an afterthought in the larger struggles of competing European empires.

With the presidential election scheduled for next month, though, Belarus is now the battleground for a new struggle, not between empires exactly, but over competing notions of how democracy should work in the nations that emerged from the Soviet wreckage.

Following popular uprisings against authoritarian leaders in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, those who would like to break Lukashenko's iron grip, from President George W. Bush to leaders across Europe, have thrown their support—and money—behind Milinkevich and an array of democratically minded activists determined to wake up a populace considered too passive, or too afraid, to challenge the state.

The activists are headed for a confrontation. Milinkevich, a 58-year-old physics professor and the unlikeliest of revolutionaries, is campaigning not for the presidency but for an uprising.

"If our campaign is successful, then we will get people out into the street," he said in December in Brest, a city of about 200,000 near the border with Poland. "This is the last chance, the last battle. If we shall not stand out in the streets, the long polar night will descend on Belarus."

Lukashenko is prepared for unrest. Last year he eliminated a legal provision that allowed members of the police force and security services to disobey what they considered an unlawful order. A new law pushed through Parliament late last year makes organizing a public protest—or making statements that discredit the state—punishable by three to five years in prison.

Lukashenko's interior minister recently ordered new measures to increase security before the election.

"Any attempt to destabilize the situation will be met with drastic action," Lukashenko said on television Jan. 27. "We will wring the necks of those who are actually doing it and those who are instigating these acts. Embassies of certain states should be aware of this. They should know that we know what they are up to. They will be thrown out of here within 24 hours."

Lukashenko, first elected in 1994 as a corruption-busting reformer in the country's last truly free election, acts as if the world were plotting to overthrow him. It is central to his cultivation of popular support and is a regular theme of the steady stream of propaganda on state television, which reports extensively on nefarious American and European—even Russian—schemes to subordinate Belarus.

In a sense, Lukashenko is right. The policies of the European Union and the United States—supporting free news media, sponsoring civic organizations and providing assistance to the country's democratic opposition—all seek to undermine his hold on power. With the election approaching, foreign aid has jumped in ways reminiscent of the cold war.

In January the European Union awarded a two-year, $2.4 million contract to a German organization, Media Consulta, to coordinate the broadcasting of news into Belarus, hoping to break an information blockade that has left most Belarussians isolated from, and ignorant about, even neighboring countries.

The Bush administration, which has labeled Belarus the only "outpost of tyranny" left in Europe, spent $11.8 million last year on democracy promotion and plans to spend $12 million in 2006. The National Endowment for Democracy, the congressionally financed nonprofit organization that promotes freedom overseas, is spending $2.2 million more on 49 grants related to the Belarus election.

For some time the United States spent this money openly in Belarus, as it has and still does in other countries of the former Soviet Union, including Russia. Lukashenko's government, however, has tightened controls over organizations that received American and European funds, closing many of them down.

The money, like the organizations themselves, has now gone underground or abroad. In December, 50 representatives of foreign ministries and international groups that support democracy gathered in Vilnius, the capital of neighboring Lithuania, to try to coordinate—and divide up—millions of dollars in aid. Thomas Adams, the State Department's aid coordinator for Europe and Eurasia, described the meeting as a gathering of "the Belarussian freedom industry."

In a long day of discussions and presentations, the slickest appeal came from four young men belonging to a group calling itself Khopits, or "enough" in Belarussian. Using a computer and a projector, they proposed launching a secret information war, distributing leaflets, stickers and newspapers—mostly satirical—as well as ribbons and scarves emblazoned with the colors of the European Union.

Khopits, according to its members and sponsors, is a network of cells with dozens of activists in 60 cities and villages. It has no vertical structure or leadership. Khopits's information war is well under way. The National Endowment for Democracy, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy of Britain and the Foreign Ministry of Germany are paying for it—with cash smuggled into Belarus in small amounts.

The cloak-and-dagger precautions undertaken by the Belarus opposition are necessary because Lukashenko has rebuilt the security apparatus that existed in Soviet times—the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or KGB.

To travel with the Milinkevich campaign is to experience an Orwellian version of democracy. In Brest, in December, he took phone calls on a fax machine from voters who had learned he would be at that number for one hour that evening; they discovered this from reading fliers that had been distributed furtively in apartment blocks.

Fear in Belarus is pervasive: fear of the police, fear of the secret service, fear of the bureaucracy at work or school that punishes any sign of antigovernment activity. This fear extends even beyond Belarus's borders.

In December, Milinkevich's senior campaign aides gathered in a basement office in Vilnius. They included Milinkevich's rival as the democratic opposition leader, Anatoly Lebedko, who narrowly lost in the opposition's congress in October.

The leaders of the democratic opposition of Belarus were there to discuss politics with Terry Nelson, the national political director of Bush-Cheney 2004, the Republican Party's campaign for the U.S. presidency. In that campaign, Nelson oversaw the president's strategy of creating a vast get-out-the-vote network by organizing volunteers. "We have neighbors talking to neighbors, and that's the way to win a close race," he said at the time.

The office in Vilnius belonged to the International Republican Institute, which is partly financed by the National Endowment for Democracy.

The question was—and remains—whether an American-style campaign can work in a place like Belarus.

"Only dictators fear revolutions," said Vladimir Kobets, who is essentially a political fugitive in his own country. He is a leader of Zubr, a youth group whose name means "bison," a symbol of the country, though not one the government embraces. Lukashenko has instead revived those of the Soviet era, including the green- and-red flag of the Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic.

If people are going to protest the election results, Zubr will provide most of the early protesters. It claims 5,000 active members and 10,000 more "volunteers." Forty young people founded Zubr in a secret meeting in a national park in January 2001. Its protests—often antigovernment antics like street performances in Lukashenko masks or graffiti campaigns—have landed dozens of the group's members in jail. According to Kobets, nearly 100 have been beaten.

Kobets, like Milinkevich, doubts the possibility of having a legitimate election, largely because Lukashenko's apparatchiks control every part of it, most important the election commissions that will count the votes and report what the federal election chief in October 2004 called "an elegant victory."

That was when Lukashenko announced a snap referendum amending constitutional term limits and allowing him to seek re-election indefinitely. The vote was widely denounced in Europe, and an independent exit poll suggested that the referendum actually received the support of less than half the voters. But it stands anyway.

Zubr's newest project is to organize protests on the 16th of each month. The date commemorates the night—Sept. 16, 1999—when Viktor Gonchar, once a deputy prime minister and election commissioner who became a popular opposition leader poised to challenge Lukashenko, disappeared along with a businessman who financed the opposition. They were evidently abducted and probably murdered. The idea is to remind Belarussians of the darker episodes in Lukashenko's rule.

On Jan. 16, several dozen young people gathered on Independence Street in the center of Minsk. A kind of flash mob gathered, though unlike those stunts elsewhere the organizers refuse to use text messages. "The KGB reads them," a young woman named Marina said. They rely on word of mouth instead.

Marina, who refused to give her last name, passed out torn shreds of blue jeans; denim is now the color of this revolution in the making. After 15 minutes, the Minsk protest was over, and the crowd drifted into the night.

Milinkevich is running exactly the sort of campaign that Terry Nelson suggested in the meeting in Vilnius. A recent poll by the Gallup Organization/ Baltic Surveys showed that three out of four Belarussians now know of him—compared with one out of four in September—and almost all of them have learned about Milinkevich by word of mouth.

Of course, Lukashenko will win—with 75 percent of the vote, according to Milinkevich. "He does not like figures below 75 percent," the opposition candidate said. Lukashenko, whose information apparatus portrays him as the last defense against chaos, might win in a free vote anyway. "What can you do?" Lukashenko told a gathering of voters late last year. "You will elect me."

Meanwhile, Milinkevich speaks of a victory over passivity and fear.

"Our victory is more important," he told a sparse audience outside a factory in Zhodino. "We want to have a victory in people's minds. If we can manage to achieve this victory, then we can go out into the streets. We will not go out with guns or stones. We will go out and show how many we are."

The historic model Milinkevich has in mind, which he and others repeat often, is Poland and Solidarity—not in 1989 when the Communist government crumbled under its own weight, but in the dark days of 1980, when Lech Walesa started his campaign of dissent.

"There was a powerful public protest," Milinkevich said in January. "The authorities could do nothing. Martial law was imposed. And that was the beginning of the end."