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      Belarus Opposition Leader Is Sentenced to 18 Years in Prison

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      The activist Sergei Tikhanovsky planned to challenge the country’s authoritarian leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, in a presidential election last year. But he was arrested before the vote.MOSCOW — A court in Belarus on Tuesday convicted an opposition leader on charges of organizing mass unrest and inciting social hatred over his attempt to challenge the country’s authoritarian leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, in a presidential election last year. It also sentenced him to 18 years in prison.The activist, Sergei Tikhanovsky, 43, ran a popular YouTube channel in Belarus before announcing his candidacy ahead of the 2020 vote. But he was arrested before the election, an act that prompted his wife, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, to step in and lead the popular movement against Mr. Lukashenko.After months of closed hearings, a court in the city of Gomel, Mr. Tikhanovsky’s hometown, confirmed that it had rendered its verdict on Tuesday. He was on trial along with five other defendants, including Nikolai Statkevich, 65, who ran against Mr. Lukashenko in the 2010 presidential election. The five other defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 14 to 16 years.Ever since mass protests set off by Mr. Lukashenko’s re-election for a sixth term as president in August 2020 — a vote widely regarded as rigged — the Belarusian leader has unleashed a campaign of political oppression unseen in Europe for decades. Thousands of people, including opposition leaders, protesters and those who subscribed to independent media outlets, have been detained. Rights groups regard hundreds of them as political prisoners.In July, a Belarusian court convicted another presidential hopeful, Viktor Babariko, on corruption charges and sentenced him to 14 years in prison. A former head of a Russian state-owned bank, Mr. Babariko led the polls before the 2020 vote but was arrested weeks before Election Day. He has denied the charges.In September, Maria Kolesnikova, one of the leaders of the protest movement that followed the election, was sentenced to 11 years in prison after law enforcement officers failed to push her out of the country. She is now leading the movement against Mr. Lukashenko from exile in Lithuania.In a video statement released before the verdict, Ms. Tikhanovskaya vowed “to continue to defend the person I love, who has become a leader for millions of Belarusians.” She added, “I will try to do something very difficult, perhaps impossible, in order to bring closer the moment when we will see him in the new Belarus.” More

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      in US Politics

      Capitol rioter facing charges for assaulting officers seeks asylum in Belarus

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      US Capitol attackCapitol rioter facing charges for assaulting officers seeks asylum in Belarus California man caught on police camera punching officers given sympathetic interview on Belarus television AP in KyivTue 9 Nov 2021 11.09 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 11.21 ESTA US man who faces criminal charges for participating in the 6 January riot at the US Capitol is seeking asylum in Belarus, the country’s state TV has reported in a development likely to heighten tensions between the turbulent ex-Soviet nation and the United States.The man, Evan Neumann, 48, of California, acknowledged in an interview with the state TV channel Belarus 1 that he was at the Capitol on 6 January but rejected the charges, which include assaulting police, obstruction and other offenses. The channel aired excerpts of the interview on Sunday and promised to release the full version on Wednesday.“I don’t think I have committed some kind of a crime,” Neumann said, according to a Belarus 1 voiceover of his interview remarks. “One of the charges was very offensive; it alleges that I hit a police officer. It doesn’t have any grounds to it.” Neumann spoke in English but was barely audible under the dubbed Russian.US court documents state that Neumann stood at the front of a police barricade wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat as a mob of pro-Trump rioters tried to force their way past officers. Prosecutors say Neumann taunted and screamed at the police before putting a gas mask over his face and threatened one officer, saying police would be “overrun” by the crowd.“I’m willing to die, are you?” prosecutors quoted Neumann saying to the officer.How a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol – visual guideRead morePolice body-camera footage shows Neumann and others shoving a metal barricade into a line of officers who were trying to push the crowd back before he punches two officers with his fist and then hits them with the barricade, according to court papers.Neumann was identified by investigators after someone who said they were a family friend called an FBI tip line with Neumann’s name and home town of Mill Valley, California. He was charged in a US federal criminal complaint, meaning a judge agreed that investigators presented sufficient probable cause that Neumann had committed the crimes.Neumann is one of more than 650 people who have been charged for their actions on 6 January, when the pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol building and delayed Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.Neumann told Belarus 1 that his photo had been added to the FBI’s most wanted list, after which he left the country under the pretense of a business trip. Neumann, who owns a handbag manufacturing business, traveled to Italy in March, and then through Switzerland, Germany and Poland he got to Ukraine and spent several months there.Seditionaries: FBI net closes on Maga mob that stormed the CapitolRead moreHe said he decided to illegally cross into neighboring Belarus after he noticed surveillance by Ukraine’s security forces. “It is awful. It is political persecution,” Neumann told the TV channel.Belarusian border guards detained the American when he tried to cross into the country in mid-August, and he requested asylum in Belarus. Belarus doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US.The US embassy in Belarus declined to comment. The Department of Justice said it does not comment “on the existence or non-existence of requests for apprehension to foreign governments”.The Belarus 1 anchors described Neumann as a “simple American, whose stores were burned down by members of the Black Lives Matter movement, who was seeking justice, asking inconvenient questions, but lost almost everything and is being persecuted by the US government.”In a short preface to the interview, the Belarus 1 reporter also said that “something” made Neumann “flee from the country of fairytale freedoms and opportunities” – an apparent snub towards the US, which has levied multiple sanctions against Belarus over human rights abuses and violent crackdown on dissent.‘Persecuted, jailed, destroyed’: Belarus seeks to stifle dissentRead moreBelarus was rocked by huge months-long protests after election officials gave the authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, a sixth term in the August 2020 presidential election that the opposition and the west have denounced as a sham.Lukashenko’s government unleashed a violent crackdown on the protesters, arresting more than 35,000 people and badly beating thousands of them. The crackdown elicited widespread international outrage.TopicsUS Capitol attackBelarusUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Democracy, or Something Like It

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      No one is fooled when authoritarian leaders carry out fake elections. So why do they bother?This is an article from World Review: The State of Democracy, a special section that examines global policy and affairs, and is published in conjunction with the annual Athens Democracy Forum.The Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, who has most recently been in power since 2007, is running for a fourth consecutive term this year. Virtually all of his potential challengers have disappeared, been detained, or pushed into exile, while the independent media has been silenced and the main opposition party has been formally disqualified from running.Yet Mr. Ortega continues to keep up the illusion of holding free elections, imitating the tactics of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Last year, Mr. Maduro’s administration cracked down on dissident leaders, journalists and activists in Venezuela ahead of December’s parliamentary elections, which were eventually boycotted by the opposition. Mr. Maduro’s governing majority and allies won 91 percent of the seats in the National Assembly.Nicaragua is not alone in constructing a democratic facade, but Mr. Ortega’s methods have been exceptionally striking. “This is a dramatic escalation of systemic repression which we haven’t seen in Latin America since the 1980s,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.“There is still a desire on the part of regimes to have a fig leaf of democracy, however not credible that is,” Mr. Shifter said. He noted that the pretense might have been the excuse Mexico and Argentina needed to avoid joining in a recent Organization of American States vote denouncing the crackdown against Mr. Ortega’s political rivals in Nicaragua.These days, governments like those in Nicaragua, Venezuela and elsewhere that reject political pluralism are ready to go to great lengths to pretend to embrace democracy — primarily by imitating the crucial rituals of periodic elections.When election time comes around, authoritarians allow a certain amount of political campaigning, vet candidates (barring or even arresting those deemed too critical of the government), then make a show of counting ballots, all the while intending to hold on to power.A polling agent with ballot boxes in Lusaka, Zambia, in August. A challenger managed to win the presidency in Zambia by more than a million votes despite the incumbent’s attempts at voter intimidation.Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated PressBut faking elections can be a tricky business. Too big a victory can draw suspicion and encourage an angry populace to gather on the streets, as happened after the 2020 presidential election in Belarus. Too big a loss can be difficult to falsify, as was the case in Zambia in August when, despite the incumbent’s overt attempts at voter intimidation, the challenger, Hakainde Hichilema, managed to win the presidency by more than a million votes.Authoritarians have learned that they must carefully weigh how and when to interfere. Too much pre-election excitement can encourage too big a turnout, drawing more votes for the opposition. A low turnout is safer, because authoritarians have ways of making sure their voters get to the polls.Such intrigues require preparation, skill and money, all for an exercise that most citizens know is a sham.So why bother to pretend?Elections, even flawed ones, serve a purpose. The goal for autocrat and democrat alike is legitimacy — a right to rule that, in the views of most citizens in the 21st century, can be bestowed only by a popular vote, or at least the semblance of one.In other eras, and even now in some parts of the world, the right to rule could be inherited by a monarch, blessed by religious faith or sustained by an iron-fisted ideology like Communism. But where those options have been exhausted, democracy — or something resembling it — seems to be the best, and maybe the only, option for maintaining a monopoly on power short of outright dictatorship.“In the contemporary world, there are, practically speaking, no alternative ideologies,” Dmitri Furman, a Russian political scientist, wrote in New Left Review in 2008. He used the term “imitation democracy” to describe the combination of democratic forms and authoritarian reality then in place across most of the former Soviet Union.This formula was recently perfected in Russia, 20 years into Vladimir V. Putin’s rule, ahead of parliamentary elections last month.A woman voting in Moscow during elections last month. President Vladimir V. Putin and his allies deployed heavy-handed measures to keep critics off the ballot and to sway apathetic voters.Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via ShutterstockThere never was any doubt that United Russia, the party backed by Mr. Putin, would come out on top. And indeed, the final vote gave the party 324 of the Duma’s 450 seats, more than enough to guarantee a constitutional, or two-thirds, majority (but fewer than the 343 seats United Russia took in 2016).Still, Mr. Putin and his allies took no chances, deploying heavy-handed measures to keep his critics off the ballot, while giving generous handouts to sway apathetic voters. Pensioners and military personnel, two crucial constituencies, received one-off pre-election bonuses, at an estimated cost of $6.7 billion to the federal government.Followers of the jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny, now legally labeled “extremists,” were barred from running, and some were put in jail or forced to flee the country. Popular candidates from Russia’s legal parliamentary parties — including the liberal centrist party Yabloko and the Communist Party — were pushed off the ballot under thinly veiled pretenses, ranging from faulty paperwork to allegations of criminal offenses. In St. Petersburg, a well-known Yabloko candidate found himself running against two people who had recently adopted not only his name but also his appearance.The Kremlin also took on independent media outlets, declaring that many journalists were foreign agents. And yet news still leaked about local officials who went to great lengths to gin up the vote for United Russia. Election officials were reportedly caught on tape discussing vote targets of 42 percent to 45 percent, presumably for United Russia, and government officials complained of being pressured by their employers to vote. In today’s Russia, these advantages are called “administrative resources,” all of which tipped the scales in United Russia’s favor.Similar tactics have worked in the past. In Russia’s 2016 parliamentary elections, officials in the city of Saratov did not take any risks. In about 100 of the city’s 373 electoral districts, the results were exactly the same: 62.2 percent for United Russia, 11.8 percent for the Communist Party, and on down the list. A local electoral commission official dismissed the suspicious results as a mere coincidence.Much has changed in the last five years. Unpopular pension reforms in 2018 have hurt both Mr. Putin and United Russia in opinion polls. Ahead of the September elections, the party’s popularity hit a record low, falling below 30 percent nationally, and even lower in the big cities.“United Russia’s polling is bad, but it doesn’t really matter,” Aleksei Mukhin, director of the Center for Political Information, a Moscow think tank, told The Moscow Times in an interview in early September. A recycled Soviet-era joke made the rounds after the elections: “You pretend to hold elections, and we pretend to vote,” a retooled version of the old quip “You pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”But elections benefit the Putin government, according to an analysis by the political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes in their book “The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy,” published last year. Elections have been turned into national rituals, spectacles that create the illusion that Russian voters can play a role in politics. They can also test the national mood, district by district, and allow the Kremlin to measure the loyalty and competence of their local officials.“You had a hard time in post-Communist Russia finding out how local officials were behaving, figuring out who was reliable, who could turn out the vote,” Mr. Holmes said in an interview. “It is not just about loyalty, but also about who is effective. Elections give you new tools to measure performance.”Paradoxically, “a managed democracy,” a term often used to describe the Putin system of government, is not so much about pretending to be democratic, but rather about pretending to manage, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Krastev said in their book. “Rigging an election also allowed the government to mimic the authoritarian power that it did not actually possess,” they wrote. “In Putin’s first decade in power, organizing a pseudo-election was like wearing sheep’s clothing to prove that you are a wolf.”But most pseudo-democrats these days are reluctant to assume their inner autocratic selves: They are not sure how to be wolves. In Nicaragua, where Mr. Ortega lost an election in 1990 after five years in power, today’s government seems to have gone further than others toward becoming a police state, but most other authoritarian rulers are careful not to cross the line, at times at the risk of seeming ineffective.Typically, they promote their hold on power as a guarantee of stability, and a protection of the nation in a hostile, unstable world. And in some cases, such leaders do in fact enjoy broad support: Mr. Putin’s popularity rating in Russia is down from a high point of 88 percent after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but it still hovers above 60 percent, well above the ratings of leaders in Western democracies.These days, elections may be a necessary tool for authoritarian systems to hold power, but they remain risky, as was the case in Zambia, where the opposition managed against all odds to score a victory that was too big to deny, and in Belarus where the falsification of the results was so obvious that protesters came out to the streets.“Politics is about promising and disappointing and managing the disappointment,” Mr. Holmes said. “The special magic of democracy is that, although a lot of people may be disappointed, they have a hope that at the next election, they can bring in another group. By giving up the idea that another group can come to power, a lot of pressure builds up.”Celestine Bohlen is a former New York Times Moscow correspondent who covered the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. More

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      No One in Europe Is Safe From My Country’s Dictator

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      Just over a year ago, on Aug. 9, 2020, I stood in Belarus’s presidential election against Aleksandr Lukashenko. The dictator, who has ruled the country for 27 years with an iron fist, stole victory from us, setting off widespread protests. We united in a national pro-democracy movement to demand the release of all political prisoners, an end to state violence and a free and fair election.The regime responded with violence. Since then, more than 35,000 people have been detained, nearly 5,000 of whom claim they were tortured. The authorities have started 4,691 politically motivated criminal cases, and according to Viasna, an independent human rights center, there are now over 600 political prisoners. Ten people have lost their lives.The past year has been hard. Belarusians learned that the road to democracy is long and arduous. But the struggle goes beyond Belarus: All democratic nations have a stake in the future of the country. Not only is there a moral imperative to support our cause, but there’s a strategic one, too, as an autocratic regime threatens to spread chaos across Europe. For the good of the continent, it must be stopped. And Belarusians, who have already come so far, must be free.The strength of our democratic movement is plain to see. Last year, on Aug. 16, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets. Since then, there have been peaceful protests, big and small, formal and informal, all over the country. By the end of the year, up to 1.5 million people had taken part in demonstrations. People organized themselves organically through social media, YouTube and Telegram channels.The opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya at a presidential campaign rally in Maladzechna, Belarus, in 2020.Sergei Gapon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere have been setbacks, of course. Our reliance on the internet made us susceptible to shutdowns and censorship — websites blocked, media outlets raided — and the regime’s merciless repression, over time, diminished some people’s appetite for protest. What’s more, we struggled to persuade state and security officials to defect, a prerequisite for the felling of the regime.In response, we’ve built a new civil society based on a network of solidarity funds, striking committees, citizen media, mutual aid organizations and volunteer groups — often coordinated through secure messaging or even printed newspapers. And we have sought, through our comprehensive plan for national reconciliation, to persuade those not involved in state crimes against Belarusians to join us. The strength of our movement lies in horizontal networks, informal communities and the shared belief in a Belarus that is free, lawful and democratic.My husband was jailed for daring to run against our president, so I ran in his place.And the world has united around us. Sometimes Belarus — as I discovered when meeting the leaders of 31 countries — is one of the few subjects on which a country’s political groups agree. Now we’re calling for a high-level international conference to develop a road map for a peaceful and negotiated way out of the crisis. Mr. Lukashenko, of course, may try to obstruct such efforts. But we believe it’s possible, through holding a free and fair election under international observation in the next six months.As I emphasized in my recent meetings with President Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, democratic countries have a moral obligation to support us: Belarus is on the front line of the struggle between autocracy and democracy. International support has been heartening, but more can be done. We want the democratic community to develop and expand aid programs — such as Denmark’s support for independent media and Germany’s funding for students — for Belarusian civil society.And the regime must be targeted. We welcome the sanctions announced by the European Union and the United States on the regime’s enterprises and individuals funding or carrying out repression: It’s now crucial to remove any loopholes Mr. Lukashenko and his allies may exploit. The regime should also be cut off from international funding coming from the United Nations, the World Bank or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development — and denied access to financial support from the International Monetary Fund. What’s more, the dictatorship in Belarus should be brought before international courts to answer for its crimes.After all, it’s not just about Belarus. The regime has become a security problem for all of Europe. In May, in an act of wanton aggression, the regime forced the landing of a European plane to capture a journalist. Just this month, a Belarusian community leader was found hanged in Kyiv. Unless we contain the bandit at large in the middle of Europe, no European citizen is safe.The regime, to be sure, could try to buy time for itself — by imitating reform and trying to trade the release of political prisoners for a softening of sanctions, as some state diplomats have suggested. The world should not be fooled. Instead, through strong and united support, the democratic nations across the globe can help Belarus step out of dictatorship and into freedom.Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (@Tsihanouskaya) is a Belarusian opposition leader.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Belarus Leader Lashes Out at the West, a Year After Crushing Protests

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      In an eight-hour news conference, President Aleksandr Lukashenko called Britain an “American lapdog” and took credit for averting World War III.MINSK, Belarus — President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the brutal and erratic ruler of Belarus, summoned his acolytes, docile members of the media and a few independent journalists on Monday to present his version of reality: The tens of thousands of Belarusians who rose up in mass protests against his disputed re-election last year were a clueless minority, he said, manipulated by the insidious West seeking to cleave his country from Russia.He insisted that his actions were not only justified, but had actually preserved world peace.“Today, Belarus is the center of attention of the whole world,” he proclaimed in the course of an eight-hour news conference in his vast, marble-floored Palace of Independence. “If we had shown weakness during the protests,” he asserted, it would have precipitated a new world war.While Mr. Lukashenko has worked hard to support his view of events, it is widely dismissed as nonsense by Belarusian activists, Western governments and independent analysts. In fact, they say, after blatantly stealing the election he ordered his law enforcement agencies to crack down on protesters using violence unseen in Europe for decades.Since then, he has driven hundreds of opposition leaders and others into exile, scrambled a fighter jet to force down a commercial plane carrying an opposition activist, and silenced independent media outlets by jailing entire newsrooms. He has paid several visits to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, seeking financial help to buoy his country’s sanctions-stricken economy.On Monday, a year after the most serious challenge to his rule, Mr. Lukashenko struck a defiant tone, receiving rapturous applause from most people in the audience as he held forth without taking a single break. Outside the palace, walls were decorated with photos of him with foreign dignitaries, and one displayed personal photos from his youth.Mr. Lukashenko lashed out at the few Western journalists who asked questions about the allegations that his regime is torturing its opponents and repressing civil society.“There were no repressions and there will be no repressions in the future because I do not need that, it would be like shooting myself in the head,” he said. His assertion contradicts findings by the United Nations; a Belarusian human rights organization, Viasna; and other watchdogs.He acknowledged that a prison in Minsk’s main detention center was “not a resort” as he had referred to it earlier in his address, but he denied allegations of torture, resorting instead to whataboutism.“Why have you killed a girl in Congress?” he asked a journalist from CNN, referring to the death of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by a police officer as she and other rioters raided the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. After that, Mr. Lukashenko said, “a question about repressions against civil society from my part just can’t be compared to the situation in your country.”He also belittled the Belarusian Olympic athlete Kristina Timanovksaya, who last week fled to Poland after openly criticizing her coaches for registering her in a race she had not trained for.“Who is she?” he asked, trying to diminish her record as a sprinter.Members of Mr. Lukashenko’s cabinet, pro-government bloggers and mostly friendly journalists from the region frequently interjected to show their support, to thank their president and to push back at the few critical questions from other journalists.Mr. Lukashenko has been living in his own, imagined world “for many years,” said Artyom Shraibman, an independent Belarusian analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, who watched the marathon speech from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. He had fled Belarus, fearing he would be arrested there. Mr. Shraibman said some members of the audience intervened after uncomfortable or challenging questions “to convince Lukashenko that the majority in the room is on his side.”Inside the ornate presidential palace on Monday.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesThose few questions, like one about the economic price of suppressing the largest-scale protest Belarus has seen since independence from the Soviet Union, seemed to throw Mr. Lukashenko off balance.“You can choke on your sanctions,” he said, referring to additional penalties imposed by Britain and the United States on Monday against him and his allies.“We didn’t know what this ‘Britain’ was for 1,000 years, and we don’t want to know it now,” he said. “You are American lap dogs!”The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday added 27 individuals and 17 entities to the list of those under sanctions, which drain the country’s export revenues. Last month, President Biden met with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Belarus’s unlikely opposition leader, who was forced to flee the country shortly after claiming victory in the presidential election.Over the years, Mr. Lukashenko has performed a balancing act with his foreign policy, playing the West off against Russia in an effort to preserve his independence while extracting economic succor from both. But Mr. Putin’s support during the protests — including a veiled threat to intervene militarily if necessary — was a critical lifeline for Mr. Lukashenko. Western sanctions have been pushing Mr. Lukashenko even closer to Mr. Putin.But during the news conference, billed as “the big conversation with the president,” Mr. Lukashenko portrayed Russia and Mr. Putin as more dependent on Belarus than vice versa. He asserted that Belarus, which borders Poland and the Baltic States, both NATO members, is Russia’s last bulwark against the West.Following that line of argument, he insisted that the protests against him last year were caused by Western countries seeking to attack “the heart of Russia” by fomenting unrest in Belarus.“Together with the Russian president, we immediately realized what they wanted from us,” he said.Today, his protestations notwithstanding, Mr. Lukashenko’s rule hangs on his personal relationship with Mr. Putin, said Katia Glod, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis. At any moment, Mr. Putin can “make some other decision,” regarding the Belarus leader, she said, for instance “push him toward a referendum” on a new constitution and resignation.While allowing during the news conference that Belarus is in talks with Russia on another $1 billion loan, Mr. Lukashenko insisted that his country would remain independent and never merge with Russia.Visitors at the presidential palace, which features a display of Soviet flags.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMr. Lukashenko has little leverage against the West. But he has been accused by the European Union of retaliating for its sanctions by trying to foment another immigration crisis in Europe when he allowed 4,000 migrants to cross into Lithuania this year, compared with 81 in 2020.“You put us under economic pressure, why should we protect you?” he asked, referring to the E.U.’s measures, which include a ban on commercial flights to Belarus.“If your planes do not fly to our country, some other planes will come,” he said. “And if planes from Afghanistan come, we will also accept them,” he added, referring to the increasing exodus from that country as the Taliban gain control of increasing territory.At the end of the news conference, Mr. Lukashenko issued a warning to the few Western journalists who were admitted to the event.“If you bring this war to us, we will have to respond,” he said. “But in this case our community, our society, is united. You can’t break us.”At that, nearly the entire audience rose in a rousing ovation. More

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      Pulling Levers in Exile, Belarus Opposition Leader Works to Keep Her Influence Alive

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      As a crackdown widens in her country, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is trying to build a broad phalanx of Western opposition to a dictatorship that she says is on its “last breaths.”VILNIUS, Lithuania — She has met Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and President Emmanuel Macron of France. Just this week, she was feted in Washington, where she was received by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.But while Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the unlikely pro-democracy leader from Belarus, may have little trouble getting a meeting, her high-flying company only underscores her predicament.It’s been almost a year since Ms. Tikhanovskaya was forced to flee Belarus after claiming victory in presidential elections. Now the challenge she faces is how to maintain influence in Belarus from abroad. The support of Western leaders may help, but goes only so far.Still, the meetings are part Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s strategy to build a broad Western phalanx against the Belarus dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who has limited her ability to challenge him inside the country, where her return would mean certain imprisonment.Only months ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand that Mr. Lukashenko resign. It was a rare democratic outburst in an eastern European country — outside the European Union and NATO — that has carefully tried to maneuver between Russia and the West, but has turned to Moscow as a primary source of support.But now opposition figures are disappearing into prisons, and protests are dwindling.“Now it’s impossible to fight openly,” Ms. Tikhanovskaya said. “It’s difficult to ask people to go out for demonstrations because of a sense of fear. They see the brutality of the regime, that the most outstanding leaders and prominent figures are in jail. It’s really scary.”An opposition rally protesting the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus, in October, 2020.Associated PressUnable to encourage protests inside Belarus, and with Moscow supporting Mr. Lukashenko, Ms. Tikhanovskaya is using the primary tool available to her in exile: Western support.This week, she had meetings at the State Department, the White House, the Senate and attended the launch of the Friends of Belarus Caucus in the House of Representatives.“I asked the U.S. to be the guarantors of our independence,” she told the Voice of America on Tuesday after meeting with Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser.In a series of meetings, she sought more comprehensive sanctions on Belarus’s elites and businesses, to show them that it was “becoming more costly for them to support Lukashenko.”Though there were statements of support and admiration from members of Congress and the Washington elite, no new measures were announced.She and her team also sought to postpone a nearly $1 billion planned disbursement by the International Monetary Fund to Belarus, but have so far been unable to convince the institution to cancel the payment.Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s trip will continue in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, underscoring the value of Western support — and its limits.Her task, she said in an interview in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she and her team have made their base, was to convince her international supporters that change can come to Belarus with their assistance.“We can’t postpone this aim because we postpone freedom of our prisoners and we have to convince other countries in this as well,” she said before leaving for the United States.Supporters of Ms. Tikhanovskaya rallied in June in Warsaw, Poland, where they held up posters of prominent opposition bloggers who are in detention.Omar Marques/Getty Images“And with these detentions, with this violence, they show that they don’t have other methods of persuading people that they are strong, except violence,” she said. “It can’t last long, really. This is like the last breaths before death, because you can’t tighten the screws endlessly.”Some who support Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s movement worry about how it can remain relevant inside Belarus with its leader abroad.“When you are abroad in a safe situation, then all your calls to action will be very skeptically accepted in Belarus,” said Pavel Slunkin, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former Belarusian diplomat.Ms. Tikhanovskaya was clear that local actors make the decisions, and that when she sought funding, it was for supporters in Belarus. “When they are ready, it’s they who decide, not us,” she said.Mr. Slunkin acknowledged that Ms. Tikhanovskaya has been a tireless and effective advocate for her country internationally. Even so, the repression in Belarus is widening.This month, the Belarus Supreme Court sentenced Viktor Babariko, a former bank chief who was barred from running for president in elections last August, to 14 years in prison for bribery and money laundering in a verdict widely seen as politically motivated.On July 14, Belarusian law enforcement officers conducted what Amnesty International called an “unprecedented wave of searches and detentions,” raiding the offices of at least a dozen civil society and human rights organizations and opposition groups.In the past year, more than 35,000 people have been detained, according to the United Nations. Tens of thousands of Belarusians have fled abroad. The list of political prisoners kept by the human rights organization Viasna, itself raided recently, includes 577 individuals.In May, a European plane traveling through Belarus’ airspace was forced to land in Minsk, where Roman Protasevich, a prominent Belarusian dissident aboard, was seized.Belarus riot police detaining a demonstrator during an opposition rally in Minsk, Belarus, in 2020.Associated PressThe environment was “very dangerous,” Ms. Tikhanovskaya acknowledged, but she insisted she and her supporters could still be effective.“God bless the internet,” she said. “I am in constant dialogue with people who are on the ground. I don’t feel like I am in exile.”There are complications as she tries to coordinate the opposition from Lithuania, which borders Belarus and where she and her team were give special diplomatic status in early July.“The more time you spend abroad, the more time you are detached from the public you represent,” Artyom Shraibman, founder of Sense Analytics and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said by phone from his self-imposed exile from Belarus in Ukraine.“If we are honest, spending a year outside of the country where the society is changing and you have not been observing it — you are only communicating with the part of society that is as engaged as you are.”Many experts, like Mr. Slunkin, believe the key way to resolve the crisis is to increase the price of Russian support for Belarus. Ms. Tikhanovskaya has been careful not to criticize Moscow openly, but neither have they succeeded in reaching out to Russian officials.“She is being perceived by many as being pro-Western, and unacceptable to Moscow, which is true,” Mr. Shraibman said. “And this is not her choice.”President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus with his primary backer, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in May.Pool photo by Sergei IlyinWith everything she does, Ms. Tikhanovskaya said, she is mindful of how her actions can affect people behind bars in Belarus, including her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, who ran a popular YouTube channel before announcing his own candidacy for president.He, like Mr. Babariko, and a prominent opposition politician, Valery Tsepkalo, was barred from running and jailed ahead of the ballot. Ms. Tikhanovskaya collected signatures for her candidacy and ran in the place of her husband.In detention since May 2020, he is currently on trial, accused of organizing riots and “inciting social hatred.”“I’m always keeping in mind that my husband is a hostage, the same as thousands of people,” Ms. Tikhanovskaya said.But she was adamant that she wants to keep the promise she campaigned on last August: new elections in which she is not necessarily on the ballot.“I’m the same woman, already with experience, already with more braveness than I had before. But look, I’m not I’m not making my career here. After elections, I will step away from all this with ease.” More

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      in World Politics

      Democracy Is Down but Not Out

      by

      Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarussian dictator, snatches a dissident from midair. Military strongman Assimi Goita launches another coup in Mali. Benjamin Netanyahu escalates a military conflict to save his own political skin in Israel. In the United States, the Republican Party launches a full-court press to suppress the vote.

      Authoritarianism, like war, makes headlines. It’s hard for democracy to compete against political crackdowns, military coups and unhinged pronouncements. Sure, democracies engage in periodic elections and produce landmark pieces of legislation. But what makes democracy, like peace, successful is not the unexpected rupture, such as the election of Barack Obama, but the boring quotidian. Citizens express their opinions in public meetings. Lawmakers receive constituents in their offices. Potholes get fixed. That’s not exactly clickbait.

      Because the absence of war doesn’t make headlines, as Stephen Pinker has argued, the news media amplifies the impression that violence is omnipresent and constantly escalating when it splashes mass murder, genocide and war crimes on the front page. Peace may well be prevalent, but it isn’t newsworthy.

      Russia Ramps Up Pressure Against Kremlin Critics

      READ MORE

      The same can be said about democracy, which has been suffering for some time from bad press. Democracies have been dragged down by corruption, hijacked by authoritarian politicians, associated with unpopular economic reforms and proven incapable (so far) of addressing major global problems like the climate crisis. After a brief surge in popularity in the immediate post-Cold War period, democracy according to the general consensus has been in retreat.

      Judging from recent quantitative assessments, the retreat has become a rout. The title of the latest Freedom House survey, for instance, is “Democracy Under Siege.” The report details how freedom around the world has eroded for the last 15 years, with 2020 featuring the greatest decline yet. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which produces a Democracy Index every year, promoted its 2020 report with the headline, “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year.” The authoritarian responses to the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the worst showing so far for the model, with the average global score plummeting from the previous year. Meanwhile, the Rule of Law Index for 2020 also registered a drop for the third year in a row.

      If we extrapolate from the current trend lines, democracy will be gone in a couple of decades, melted away like the polar ice. But it’s always dangerous to make such extrapolations given history’s tendency to move in cycles not straight lines. So, let’s look at some reasons why democracy might be in for a comeback.

      The Pandemic Recedes in America

      Much of the reason for democracy’s dismal record in 2020 was the expansion of executive power and state controls in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of those power grabs, such as Vladimir Putin’s constitutional changes in Russia, are still in place. Some countries, like India and Brazil, are still struggling with both COVID-19 and powerful authoritarian leaders.

      But even with the continued high rate of infection in a number of countries, the overall trajectory of the disease is downward. Since peaking in late April, the reported number of global cases has dropped nearly by half. So, two trend lines are now intersecting: the lifting of pandemic restrictions and the backlash against hapless authoritarians.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Americans, for instance, are coming to terms with both the retreat of COVID and the removal of Donald Trump from the White House, Facebook and Twitter. The Biden administration is undoing many of Trump’s undemocratic moves, including those imposed during the pandemic around immigration and refugees. The attempts by the Republican Party to tamp down voter turnout proved spectacularly unsuccessful in 2020, which despite the pandemic featured the largest-ever increase in votes from one election to the next. In terms of the voting-age population, you have to go back to 1960 to find an election with a higher percentage turnout than the 62% rate in 2020.

      This surge in voters helped put Joe Biden over the top. It has also motivated the Republican Party to redouble its efforts, this time at the state level, to suppress the vote. It is doing so under the false narrative that electoral fraud is widespread and that President Biden’s victory is somehow illegitimate. And it is setting the stage to orchestrate an authentic election theft in 2024.

      The backlash against these anti-democratic moves has been encouraging, however. When the state of Georgia passed its voting restrictions in April, pressure from voting rights advocates forced prominent Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta to reverse themselves and come out against the bill (though only after the bill had already passed). Major League Baseball pulled its all-star game from Atlanta, and Hollywood has also threatened a boycott.

      These moves motivated Texas-based companies to protest that state’s version of voting restrictions before the legislature scheduled a vote. None of that stopped Texas Republicans from pushing ahead with the bill. So, last weekend, Texas Democrats had to deploy the nuclear option of walking out of the chamber to stop the vote suppression bill from passing. These courageous Texans, up against a powerful and determined state Republican Party, are now looking to the federal government to safeguard voting rights.

      At the federal level, the Democrats have put forward for the second time a comprehensive voting reform bill, the For the People Act, to expand access, reduce corruption and limit the impact of money on politics. The House approved a version of this bill in 2019, but it died in the Republican-controlled Senate. The House passed the reboot in March, but it again faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate because filibuster rules require at least 60 votes to pass and Democrats can muster only 50 (plus the vice-president’s).

      A failure to find “10 good Republicans” for this bill, the cadre that Senator Joe Manchin naively expected to step forward to pass legislation creating a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, may finally push the Democrats to scrap or at least significantly modify the filibuster rules, which were famously used to block further enfranchisement of African-Americans in the 20th century.

      High voter turnout and efforts to secure voting rights are not the only signs of a healthy US democracy. Last year, the largest civic protests in US history took place as tens of millions of Americans expressed their disgust with police violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Civic organizations stepped forward to fight the pandemic and ensure more equitable access to vaccines. Young people, in particular, are engaged in large numbers on the climate crisis, gun control and reproductive health. After a long winter of discontent under Trump, perhaps it’s time for an “American Spring.”

      Mixed Record Elsewhere for Democracy

      Europe, meanwhile, is coming out of the pandemic in slightly stronger shape politically. The budget compromise that took place at the end of 2020, which ended up providing considerable relief to the economically disadvantaged countries of the southern tier, effectively saved the European Union from disintegrating out of a lack of solidarity. Alas, the compromise also watered down the EU’s criticism of its easternmost members, particularly Poland and Hungary, for their violations of the bloc’s commitments to human rights and rule of law.

      But there’s hope on the horizon here as well. Eastern Europe appears to be on the verge of a political sea change. Voters brought down Bulgaria’s right-wing populist leader Boyko Borissov in elections in April, and the new caretaker government has begun to dismantle his political system of cronyism. In Slovenia, tens of thousands of protesters have massed in the capital of Ljubljana, the largest demonstration in years, to demand the resignation of the Trump-like prime minister Janez Jansa. The near-total ban on abortion orchestrated by the right-wing government in Poland has motivated mass protests by women throughout the country, and even “Polish grannies” have mobilized in support of a free press and the rule of law. A finally united opposition in Hungary, meanwhile, is catching up in the polls to Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of elections next year.

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      The far right, with their contempt for human rights, free media, rule of law and political checks and balances, are the greatest threat to democracy within democracies. Fortunately, they are not doing very well in Western Europe either. The anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland has witnessed a significant drop in support in Germany, while Lega in Italy has also declined in popularity. Golden Dawn has disappeared from the scene in Greece. Vox is still the third most popular party in Spain, but it hasn’t managed to rise much above 15% in the polls, which is the same story for the Sweden Democrats (stuck at around 19%). Only in France and Finland are the far-right parties continuing to prosper. Marine Le Pen currently leads the polls against French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of next year’s election, while the Finns Party leads by a couple of percentage points in the polls but with elections not likely before 2023.

      Elsewhere in the world, the pandemic may result in more political casualties for far-right populists, as they get caught in the ebbing of the Trump wave. Brazilians are protesting throughout the country under the banner of impeaching Jair Bolsonaro, a president who, like Trump, has compiled a spectacularly poor record in dealing with COVID-19. Bolsonaro’s approval rating has fallen to a new low under 25%. The still-popular former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently cleared by the courts to run again for office, appears to be assembling a broad political coalition to oust Bolsonaro in the elections set for next year.

      Hard-right leader Ivan Duque has achieved the distinction of being the least popular leader in Colombian history. Politically, it doesn’t matter so much, since he can’t run again for president in next year’s election. But the public’s disgust with the violence in Colombia and the economic inequality exacerbated by the pandemic will likely apply as well to any of his would-be hard-right successors.

      The extraordinary mishandling of the pandemic in India has had a similar effect on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, which has also recently fallen to a new low. However, after seven years in office, he remains quite popular, with a 63% approval rating.

      Modi’s Teflon reputation speaks to the fragility of democracy in many parts of the world. Many voters are attracted to right-wing nationalists like Modi — Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador — who promise to “get the job done” regardless of the political and economic costs. Such leaders can rapidly turn a democratic country into a putatively democratic one, which makes the step into authentic authoritarianism that much easier.

      The coups in Mali and Myanmar, China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, the enduring miseries in North Korea, Venezuela and Eritrea — these are all reminders that, however fragile democracy might be in formally democratic states, politics can always get a lot worse.

      Lukashenko: Strong or Weak?

      Take the example of Belarus, where Alexander Lukashenko has ruled supreme since 1994. Thanks to his own ruthlessness and the patronage of neighboring Russia, Lukashenko has weathered mass protests that would have ousted leaders of weaker disposition.

      His latest outrage was to order the grounding of a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania as it was flying over Belarus — just so that he could apprehend a young dissident, Roman Protasevich, and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Virtually everyone has decried this blatant violation of international laws and norms with the exception, of course, of Putin and others in the Russian president’s orbit. The editor of the Russian media conglomerate RT, Margarita Simonyan, tweeted, “Never did I think I would envy Belarus. But now I do. [Lukashenko] performed beautifully.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Lukashenko indeed came across as all-powerful in this episode. But this is an illusion. Putin has not hesitated to assassinate his critics, even when they are living outside Russia. Lukashenko doesn’t have that kind of reach or audacity, so he has to wait until dissidents are within his own airspace to strike. I’d like to believe that the opposition in Belarus takes heart from this desperate move — is Lukashenko really so scared of a single dissident? —  and doubles down on its efforts to oust the tyrant.

      Outside of Putin and his toadies, Lukashenko doesn’t have many defenders. This elaborate effort to capture a dissident only further isolates the Belarussian strongman. Even putatively democratic states, like Poland and Hungary, have unequivocally denounced Lukashenko.

      Anti-democratic actions like the Ryanair stunt capture headlines in ways that pro-democratic efforts rarely do. Honestly, had you even heard of Roman Protasevich before this affair? Along with all the other depressing news of the day, from Texas to Mali, this brazen move suggests that democracy is teetering on the edge of an abyss.

      But all the patient organizing against the strongmen that doesn’t make it into the news will ultimately prove the fragility of tyranny. When it comes to anti-democrats like Lukashenko, they will one day discover that the military, the police and the party have abandoned them. And it will be they who teeter at the abyss, their hands scrabbling for a secure hold, when along comes democracy to give them a firm pat on the back.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      ¿Qué pasa en Bielorrusia? Una guía básica

      by

      Un avión que no llegó a su destino planeado, un periodista disidente detenido y todo lo que pasó antes del “secuestro de Estado” del que todos hablan.El aterrizaje forzoso de un vuelo comercial el domingo, considerado por varios países como un secuestro de Estado, ha puesto a Bielorrusia y a su presidente, Alexander Lukashenko, de nuevo en primer plano a nivel mundial.Se produjo a menos de un año de que los bielorrusos se enfrentaron a una violenta represión policial al protestar por los resultados de unas elecciones que muchos gobiernos occidentales tacharon de farsa.Según los gobiernos occidentales, el vuelo de Ryanair procedente de Atenas y con destino a Vilna, Lituania, fue desviado a Minsk con la excusa de una amenaza de bomba, con el objetivo de detener a Roman Protasevich, un periodista disidente de 26 años. En un video publicado por el gobierno, confesó haber participado en la organización de “disturbios masivos” el año pasado, pero sus amigos dicen que la confesión se hizo bajo amenaza.Para quienes intentan ponerse al día, he aquí el contexto que los ayudará a seguir a la par de la historia en curso. More