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In Belarus, the ‘Party Vans’ are out. And that’s a bad thing.
Sporadic tax protests in Belarus have flourished into an all-out anti-government campaign. But in Europe’s Last Dictatorship, cries of freedom are often met with the cudgel.
Story by a Latterly staff writer
MINSK, Belarus
When Belarusians protested a controversial new government tax last month, the employees of Viasna, the country’s most prominent human rights watchdog, watched nervously. They knew what was coming.
Protests in Belarus usually follow a distinct narrative. First, there is an electoral victory or a new decree by President Alexander Lukashenko. Then opposition groups gather. Then there is violence.
In 2010, when Lukashenko, a heavy-set former farm director, won a reported 79.69 percent of that year’s presidential election, 10,000 people marched through their capital city, Minsk, waving flags and demanding his removal from office. The crowd’s breath, blowing skyward in great plumes of steam, gave the impression they had set the frostbitten streets ablaze.
Around the protesters, agents of the KGB (Belarus is the only state to have kept the name of its former Soviet state security) stood by, pointing cameras into the crowd. Riot police gathered and staked their shields at the base of a giant statue of Lenin preaching at a lectern to his former satrapy. Nearby, a row of dark-green military vehicles lined up. These were the “party buses” locals feared the most.
In the attacks that followed, officers herded dozens of protesters into them. Some have never been seen since.
Viasna’s office was ransacked six times. Its leader, Ales Bialiatski, was given a four-and-a-half-year prison term on a trumped-up tax charge. Others were held and intimidated.
Last month, however, something extraordinary happened. The protests weren’t met with violence. There were no handycam-holding KGB agents. The party buses stayed on their lots.
No one was as surprised as the Viasna team. I visited their office in early March. It sits on a nondescript street a couple of metro stops from the city’s downtown, near a small row of stores and cheap restaurants. It is cramped, and probably costs little more than $400 a month to rent. I spoke to three of its lawyers in a small kitchen that doubles as the conference room.
First we discussed the thing that had brought thousands of Belarusians out of their homes. It is called the “law against social parasites,” and it levies a $250 fine on those who cannot prove they have worked 183 days of the year.
Those who cannot pay the fine — and since $250 is more than half the average monthly salary, that is most people — may be forced into $10-a-month government work including sweeping the streets of Minsk, which is hailed as The World’s Cleanest Capital City. Ordinary Belarusians are being turned into state-sanctioned slaves.
That is not new. Previous edicts have targeted political adversaries, ethnic minorities and even drunks — in other words, people it is easy for Lukashenko and his lackeys to demonize.
But this law affects everyone. A reported unemployment rate of 0.9 percent is laughed at. Jobs are tough to find, and working as a freelancer involves labyrinthine bureaucracy. That is at least partly why so many have taken to the streets in protest. Some have even flashed slogans in front of TV cameras, an activity that previously would all-but guarantee you a ride in the party bus.
Most people I spoke to agreed the tax would be rescinded, allowing Lukashenko to disavow its unpopularity and play the benevolent dictator — hence, too, the lack of jackboots. They were right: Last week Lukashenko announced the suspension of the tax for a year.
But there is more at stake. Belarus is poor. Its economy is failing and in desperation it has opened up to investment from abroad, especially China, and has even dropped traditionally tight border controls. Even some musicians, banned in years past, have been allowed to perform again.
“The social contract here is changing,” one of Viasna’s lawyers told me. “Before, people would give up political rights to get a safe life. Now they can’t do that. We hope it will change things.”
But this means Lukashenko’s iron grip on power must slip — if only by the small concession not to beat his dissenting citizens senseless. And that will likely incur the wrath of Vladimir Putin, with whose Russia Belarus shares an almost nonexistent border and which supplies Lukashenko with vital subsidies.
Putin and Lukashenko, it is widely known, are not personal friends. Their relationship is, like the Kremlin’s umbilical cord to Minsk, a cheap utility: the autocrat and the dictator.
Lukashenko, having seen in Crimea what happens when the king isn’t paid his fealty, is being forced into a near-impossible situation. Does he open his country a little, and risk an ouster — or invasion — or does he clamp down and risk popular chaos?
Increasingly, over the course of this confusing affair, he is turning to the latter. Police have begun to disperse protesters. Giant BR6 “Predator” water cannon trucks have started showing up in parks and side streets. Journalists have been locked up.
I spoke to one of them, Belsat TV’s Catarina Andreeva, last week. She told me how she and a local politician were bundled into an unmarked cop car and held in a filthy cell, illegally, for a day. The car, Andreeva told me, had a Russian flag on one of its windows.
“Things have changed and now the police can just steal people from the street,” she said. “Nobody knows if they are real police because they are wearing civil clothes.”
If that doesn’t sound scary enough, people have begun speaking about camping in Lenin Square in defiance of Lukashenko, on March 25. Some want a Belarusian Maidan. In the pursuit of freedom, protesters are putting themselves in the state’s crosshairs. “The atmosphere in society is constant fear,” Andreeva told me. “Many experts say there will be blood.”
Whatever the outcome, it seems “Europe’s Last Dictatorship,” as many call Belarus, is at a crossroads. That it crosses that path without violence is unlikely.
