A new wave of Belarusization is likely ahead; however, Foreign Ministry puts little effort into it

While some changes in the foreign ministry's language policy are encouraging, they are happening much too slowly, writes Igar Gubarevich.

Belarus' President Aliaksandr Lukashenka said in 1994 that the Belarusan language was a poor one, unfit for expressing anything grand. His senior diplomats appear to be proving him wrong.

On 19 February, Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei publicly recited the poem "Motherland" written by Janka Kupala, a famous Belarusan poet. Two weeks later, his deputy, Alena Kupchyna, inaugurated an art exhibition in perfect Belarusan. Both of them share an internal conviction that Belarusan should play a greater role in public life.

The foreign ministry has long been a vanguard of the progressive Belarusan bureaucracy. However, despite these and other examples of changing attitude towards the national language, most diplomats still scarcely use it - more out of indifference and lack of proper guidance than because of any policy restrictions.

The Belarusan language as a cornerstone of the country's independence

Moscow's ideological coverage of its actions in Ukraine should have warned the Belarusan ruling elite of the vulnerability of having a weak national identity. Russia has been clearly demonstrating it is eager to stake out a claim in lands where Russian remains a predominant language.

The authorities have finally heard the warning shot across the bow. President Aliaksandr Lukashenka spoke in Belarusan at a National Day holiday celebration in July. It sent a signal to the nomenklatura that they should not regard the use of national language an apanage of the opposition. Later on, Lukashenka and other senior officials advocated for a greater role of the Belarusan language and culture.

Many expected that the foreign ministry, as one of the country's showcase institutions, would take the lead in this process. This government agency has the advantage of employing many well-educated and open-minded people.

However, the results thus far have been mixed. While some changes are under way, the Russian language still heavily dominates the ministry's communications and internal workings.

The Belarusan language: personal choice, institutional indifference

In mid-1990s, the prospects of the Belarusan language in the foreign ministry seemed much brighter. Piotr Krauchanka, the then foreign minister, conducted the meetings in Belarusan. Many diplomats, from attachés to Krauchanka's deputies, studied the language with a ministry-paid coach.

Everything changed when Lukashenka arrived. The ministry has never expressly prohibited or penalised the use of Belarusan by diplomats in their work, though it has long failed to encourage or promote it either.

In fact, any advance or retreat of the Belarusan language's usage in the foreign ministry has rarely been an institutional decision. It mostly depended on personal choice or preferences of individuals working there. Here is a brief anecdote to support this point.

The foreign ministry has always had two telephone directories, one for the headquarters in Minsk and the other for its foreign missions. In 1995, a minister's assistant, a Belarusan-language enthusiast, translated both directories into Belarusan. The foreign ministry used them until 1998, when it merged with the ministry of external economic relations.

Then, another official, in charge of creating a unified directory, translated the old MFA's part back into Russian. Since then, the HQ directory has always been in Russian. As the merger never affected the foreign missions' network, their phone directory still exists and gets updated in Belarusan.

There have been no reports of the ministry preventing its staff from speaking or writing in Belarusan. The author of this article, while serving in the ministry from 1993 to 2006, drafted most of his correspondence in Belarusan – both internal memos and documents addressed to other government agencies.

These included a few memos to President Lukashenka on standing issues between Belarus and the US. Ural Latypov, the then foreign minister (born in Russia), signed them without posing any question with regard to the choice of the language. The author's preference for Belarusan never affected his career.

Two waves of Belarusization?

Back in 2010, the foreign ministry adopted a set of measures to promote the use of Belarusan in its internal workings and external communications. (Ironically, they wrote the internal Belarusization plan in Russian).

The ministry failed to implement many of these measures, i.e. the provision on promoting the Belarusan language in the activities of the MFA-controlled National Centre for Marketing and Price Study. The plan died in December 2010, together with the thaw in relations with the West.

The 2010 plan included, among other things, a provision regarding the Belarusan-language versions of the ministry's and its foreign missions' web sites. The foreign ministry's web site acquired a Belarusan-language version only in July 2014, in the 23rd year of the country's independence. Now, the MFA's press service runs all news reports in three languages, Belarusan, Russian and English.

Previously, the Russian-language section of the web site hosted rare news items written in Belarusan. They came almost exclusively from a narrow circle of embassies – in Bonn, Budapest, Paris and Warsaw – as well as the permanent mission to the UN in New York.

All of Belarus' foreign missions, with the exception of the embassy in Moscow, have their web sites based on the same template, which allows one to choose between several languages. However, only four embassies out of over fifty – in France, Germany, Hungary and Poland – have Belarusan-language versions of their web sites.

About two dozen Belarus' embassies now have Twitter accounts. Only the embassy in France and the MFA's press service care to post some of their tweets in Belarusan.

MFA's spokesman Dzmitry Mironchyk reassured Belarus Digest that the ministry "remained committed to wider use of the Belarusan language in its daily activities and communications to the outside world". However, he stressed that the ministry embraced the principle of "reasonable sufficiency and maximum efficiency" when choosing the language for its communications.

In July 2014, the Belarusan-language newspaper Zviazda started a series of interviews with Belarusan ambassadors and other senior diplomats. The fact that it happened simultaneously with the emergence of the Belarusan-language web site would seem to indicate that a new wave of Belarusization is likely ahead.

However, it seems that the ministry is putting little effort into this process. Indeed, some steps do not even require any financial support or a much in the way of perseverance and could be quite symbolic, such as using Belarusan-language nameplates during official meetings.

While some changes in the foreign ministry's language policy are encouraging, they are happening much too slowly. For a new wave of Belarusization to succeed, the ministry's senior officials must show more determination, while rank-and-file diplomats need to show more interest and personal involvement. So far, these factors are largely lacking.

Originally published at BelarusDigest