Politics
Belarus Ambassador Defends
Controversial Election Victory
by Anna Gawel
As a handful of protesters stood outside the Embassy of Belarus in Washington—and hundreds more were detained for demonstrating in the capital of Minsk—Belarusian Ambassador Mikhail Khvostov defended the controversial election victory of President Alexander Lukashenko and the subsequent detention of nearly 600 protesters.
Those arrests quickly prompted the European Union and the United States to slap travel restrictions and other possible sanctions on Belarus, and seemed to seal the country’s status as a pariah state in Western eyes.
But the ambassador says the West has got it all wrong when it comes to the former Soviet state. “That’s not an app
roach which will give success or results coming from the sanctions. The approach of Belarus was always very open and frank,” Khvostov said, insisting that the uproar over the elections has been blown out of proportion. “They were allowed to demonstrate their feelings, but the government has one obligation: to protect the other citizens. The majority of the population of Belarus supported [Alexander Lukashenko] in the last presidential election and voted in this way to be re-elected. Elections are over. Revolution is over.”
The diplomatic furor, however, is far from over. President Lukashenko, who has maintained iron-clad control of the government for more than a decade, has been accused of being “Europe’s last dictator,” and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has labeled Belarus one of the world’s “outposts of tyranny.”
The tensions came to a boil following Lukashenko’s landslide victory in the March 19 presidential elections—his third since taking the helm of the ex-Soviet state in 1994—in what many international observers decried as a “farce.”
Despite the Western critics, the ambassador is quick to point out that Lukashenko enjoys the support of the people whose opinions ultimately matter the most to him: the Belarusian public, which he says favors the stability and economic growth that Lukashenko has brought to the nation of 10 million. “We have the kind of political system that the society wants to be,” Khvostov said. “We cannot change stability for uncertainty.”
Many seemed to disagree with that assessment, especially supporters of opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich, thousands of whom streamed into the streets of Minsk to denounce the election results. Hundreds of those protesters, including two opposition candidates as well as the Polish ambassador to Belarus, were detained by security forces, drawing swift condemnation from the European Union and the United States, which imposed targeted travel and financial bans on Belarus, with some countries pushing for tougher economic sanctions.
In mid-April, the EU specifically barred President Lukashenko and 30 other Belarusian officials from entering any of the union’s 25 member countries, a blacklist the EU has only reserved for two other heads of state, the leaders of Zimbabwe and Burma. Khvostov argues that this comparison is unfair, and that any efforts to isolate the country will only alienate the Belarusian people and ultimately won’t have much of a political or economic impact. “[Sanctions] won’t be effective because besides some EU countries and the United States, we have a majority of the other world [that has relations with us],” he said, citing countries such as Russia, India and China.”
Moreover, he said the EU might lose a vital trading partner if it distanced itself economically from Belarus, which is a major provider of tractors, heavy dump trunks, mineral fertilizers and textiles. “It’s not in the EU interests, and it is not the vision of the European Union for the development of the whole continent,” Khvostov said, noting that the EU market now accounts for about 45 percent of Belarusian trade, a significant jump from the early 1990s.
Relations with the United States, both on the economic and political fronts, are even more dismal. Outgoing White House spokesman Scott McClellan condemned Lukashenko’s protest crackdown, accusing the government of having “forcibly seized and detained citizens of Belarus who were peacefully demonstrating against the fraudulent March 19 election results.”
But the ambassador counters that criticism by pointing to the fact that the protesters were allowed to voice their opinions for several days without any retaliation—the time had simply come to move on and accept the results. “People have the right to gather. People have the right to criticize their government—that’s universally accepted and Belarus is not an exclusion. But we cannot understand what was the purpose of hundreds of juveniles gathered in the central square of Minsk,” he said. “The majority voted and the voting is over.”
He added that the protesters, who now face various administrative charges, were no longer in compliance with the law, drawing parallels with protests that are broken up in the United States whenever they get out of hand. “If you want to in the United States hold a demonstration or rally, then you have to be in compliance with local or national laws…. It’s not the situation that [the Belarusian] government does not permit people to demonstrate … but we do have law in the country and any activity, social or political, must be in compliance with the law.”
But many human rights groups say the long arm of the law in Belarus stifles everything from independent media to private investment to freedom of religion, and that Lukashenko’s strong public support in the recent election stems from a “pattern of intimidation.”
The ambassador, however, emphatically denied these allegations. “You cannot intimidate Belarusians—no, not at all. What’s the reason for me to vote for a candidate that I don’t want to support? No there’s no reason for that. We have our own character.
“You cannot falsify elections. It’s impossible,” he added, noting that the government invited thousands of outside and internal observers to monitor the election. But observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said the government did just that, calling the elections neither free nor fair—although Khvostov pointed to a report by monitors from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), composed of the former Soviet republics, that was “totally different” from the OSCE verdict and validated the election results.
Similarly, Khvostov argues that the referendum passed in 2004, which changed the constitution to end presidential term limits—and which was widely seen as a power grab by Lukashenko—was the result of people’s choice. “It wasn’t a decision by the parliament or by the executive—not at all. It was a decision taken by the people of Belarus, and the constitution has been amended. The people spoke.”
And that is the line of argument the ambassador stresses when asked about the authoritarian leadership style of Lukashenko: The majority of people in Belarus still prefer it.
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