Belarusian Intelligence Services as Now Arranged and Subordinated Threaten Country’s National Security, Ogurtsov and Pastukov Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 5 – The agencies charged with protecting Belarusian national security are in fact undermining it because the country’s special services are used by the president against his political enemies rather than serving to alert Minsk to threats to the country’s national security, Igor Ogurtsov and Mikhail Pastukhov say.

            The Belarusian security services have received relatively little attention because the country has few independent specialists on them, and the only individual whose ideas have attracted attention, Andrey Porotnikov, is someone who is an apologist for the current presidential arrangements, the two analysts say (nmnby.eu/news/analytics/6967.html).

            In a new Nashe mnenie commentary, the two sharply criticize Porotnikov’s ideas as laid out most prominently at nmnby.eu/news/analytics/5707.html in January 2015 and suggest five steps that the Belarusian authorities need to take if the special services are going to defend Belarus and not just Lukashenka.

            Porotnikov’s ideas were developed in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and reflected more what was happening in that country than the situation in Belarus as such. That was a mistake, Ogurtsov and Pastukhov say, because it understated the extent to which the Belarusian special services serve only the president and not the country.

            “In our view,” they write, “such a state of affairs is a threat to the national security of the country to the extent that the special services do not act according to their direct assignment but have been converted into ordinary punitive organs.” In most countries, the intelligence services report not just to the president but to the parliament as well. Belarus must follow that pattern.

            Ogutsov and Pastukhov call for the introduction of parliamentary control over the special services. (Talk about societal control, they argue, is simply a smokescreen to keep the present arrangements in place.) And they urge that intelligence functions be concentrated in a single agency rather than divided into many parts as Porotnikov proposed.

            To achieve those ends, they call on the Belarusian government to take five steps:

First, in place of the Committee on State Security (KGB), establish a National Security Service.

Second, conduct a purge of the officers of the KGB, reduce its size and functions, and redivide it so that the president will find it harder to use against the population.

Third, explicitly exclude from the new agency any domestic political role.

Fourth, make the new agency the coordinator for all intelligence work by subgroups in other ministries such as the ministry of defense.

And fifth, set up legally defined and transparent arrangements for all these goals.

            To begin, the Belarusian parliament must pass a special law on the intelligence service, it must have the power to confirm and dismiss the leader of this service, and it should establish a special permanent committee to monitor what the intelligence service does.

            All of this may seem and actually be utopian as long as Alyaksandr Lukashenka is in power, but the new article suggests that a new discussion of an issue long ignored is about to break out in Minsk, if not yet within the Lukashenka regime than already among those who are its opponents.