Belarus: So, where is the Revolution?

Where is the interfering and meddling hand of the West? What colour will the Revolution be this time?

Photo: Belarus: So, where is the Revolution?

Belarus: So, where is the Revolution?

Strange. There has been an election in an ex-Soviet Republic – Belarus, but where are the NGOs, funding groups of subversives and hijacking the country’s culture and laws? Isn’t there going to be a velvet revolution or an orange revolution? Where are the second-line politicians, bribed and trained for their task by Washington? Isn’t Belarus going to apply for EU membership or ask to join NATO? What happened to the final piece of the jigsaw on Russia’s west flank?

Isn’t anyone going to back up the defeated opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, who has called for street protests (concentrations of terrorists and vandals) and who has deried the elections as unfair? After all, Milinkevich achieved a hefty six per cent of the vote. He must have been popular, so popular in fact that he got exactly the same percentage of the vote as many analysts predicted, while Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected as President with some 82.6%, in a 92.6% turnout.

Vladimir Rushailo, head of a CIS monitoring committee, stated yesterday that his teams of monitors did not see any serious violations in this election.

Alexander Lukashenko begins his third term knowing his country and his people are behind him, after a free and fair democratic election which saw the three opposition candidates garner less than 12% of the vote between them. Apart from the 6% of Milinkevich (Allied Opposition/Unified Democratic Forces), Sergei Gaidukevich (Liberal Democrat) managed 3.5% and Aleksandr Kozulin (Social Democrat), 2.3%.

Why did Alexander Lukashenko win? Because he has guaranteed a swift and silky-smooth transition from a controlled to a market economy, he has avoided the hiccoughs felt in other ex-Soviet states and he has maintained the stability of the economy, of the work market and has guaranteed the lot of the average citizen, from the schoolchild to the pensioner.

If the meddlesome and interfering West bothered to employ analysts who had any idea what they were speaking about and did not work from their offices in comfortable western capitals and if their so-called free press stopped telling lies (a habit that has become worse since the end of the Cold War), we would not hear such ludicrous terms as “Lukashenko the Dictator” and absurd claims that the E.U. will impose sanctions.

Why? Because Lukashenko won? Certainly Moscow will be able to match clout for clout the sanctions imposed by the European Union, that clique of self-righteous former imperialist colonialist states whose recent history is marred by the stain of slavery and the wholesale slaughter of populations in developing countries. Who is the European Union to speak?

As for the USA, did Lukashenko invade a sovereign state, slaughter 100.000 people, wire up prisoners’ genitals with electrodes, urinate on their food and set dogs on them? Or did he mind his own business performing good governance in his own country? Compare this with the “democratic” calls for civil disobedience by the heavily defeated Milinkevich.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

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