Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 22 -- Belarusian nationalists over the last year
“not only have come out of ‘the political ghetto’ into which they have been
since the end of the 1990s but also have become an influential political force”
in Mensk, indeed a force that even Alyaksandr Lukashenka has had to take into
consideration and play up to.
Yesterday, as Lukashenka visited
Kyiv and restated his support for Ukraine, a Congress in Defense of the
Independence of Belarus met in Mensk and declared that it had succeeded in
gathering a million signatures on a petition in support of that goal, something
its organizers said showed the vitality of Belarusian nationalism (gazeta.ru/politics/2014/12/21_a_6354521.shtml).
The group said
that it saw the main threat to the independence of Belarus not so much in
Russian but rather in the Eurasian Economic Union which is supposed to begin
operation on January 1, a distinction that may have made it easier for the
organizers to hold their meeting and to gather support in the population.
Elena Anisim,
head of the organizing committee, said that the group’s goal “was to declare before
the end of 2014 that the Belarusian people does not intend to become aprt of
any other country. Despite all its difficulties … the Belarusian Republic must
remain an independent, neutral and self-standing state.”
She said that
the congress was not opposed by the Lukashenka regime because “today the
interests of the nationalists and the authorities coincide, both the first and
the second are concerned about the loss of independence and falling under still
greater dependence on Russia.” Anisim is sometimes mentioned as a possible
opposition candidate for president.
According to
the “Gazeta” report, “practically all the participants of the Congress for
Independence in their speeches one way or another referred to the situation in
Ukraine, above all in order to illustrate the negative role, from their point
of view, of Russia in the post-Soviet space.
That Lukashenka
did not try to prevent the congress shows some “serious and very rapid changes in
the politics of the Belarusian authorities” over the last year. Lukashenka had
been an active opponent of Belarusian nationalists, exiling or suppressing
their leaders and regularly attacking their ideas.
He replaced the
national flag with the Soviet-era one and the government shield as well. And he
helped engineer the slit of the main political organization of the nationalists,
the Belarusian Peoples Front, into two competing factions. As a result, the nationalists were ever less
significant players in the opposition. Instead, the democrats and former
communists dominated that wing of Belarusian life.
The Belarusian
nationalists began emerging from what “Gazeta” calls their “’political ghetto’”
just before the end of 2013 and the Maidan in Kyiv. Belarussianness once again became
fashionable, and the leaders of this trend both promoted and took advantage of
that development.
But the
nationalists were also inspired to act by the emergence in Belarus of
pro-Russian groups. Given that choice, Lukashenka increasingly gave the nod to the
former as a means of protecting his own position. He used the Belarusian
language which he does not know well, increased the number of hours of
Belarusian language instruction in the schools, and so on.
At the same
time, the Belarusian leader began to comment about Russia’s unfriendly acts and
the “threats to the sovereignty of Belarus coming from Moscow.” He continued to
oppose the titular democratic opposition and at the end of last year blocked it
from holding a Congress of Democratic Forces.
Nonetheless,
the holding of the current congress of nationalists would have seemed unlikely
only a year ago, an indication of just how far and how fast things have
changed, especially since the congress announced that it would be a continuing
organ, something that makes it almost into a political party just a year before
presidential elections.
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