The West should follow Poland’s lead on Belarus

Andrew A. Michta is Professor of International Studies at Rhodes College and a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.  He is the incoming director of the GMF Warsaw office, which will open in June.

The human and civil rights drama unfolding in Belarus in the aftermath of the electoral fraud perpetrated by the regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko should be a teaching moment.  It shows that hopes of bringing Belarus closer to the West through a policy of carefully calibrated carrots and sticks were largely an illusion.  The question now is whether the United States and Europe can draw the necessary lessons from the crackdown in Minsk and, also, how they will translate those lessons into policy.

The West’s ability to influence Lukashenko has always been marginal at best.  In contrast, Russia holds far greater sway over Lukashenko’s decisions, notwithstanding occasional friction between Minsk and Moscow.  A “colored revolution” –- long a hope of the West — is not in the cards in Belarus due to the level of police terror applied by the regime, the changing regional dynamic in Eastern Europe, and the more inward-focused priorities in the European Union and the United States.

Nonetheless, Belarus requires a unified response, for it is a piece of a larger Europe, whose periphery is now increasingly being defined by the aftermath of the 2008 Georgia War, the 2010 Ukrainian election, and the resurgence of Russian influence.  It is in the interest of the West to develop a long-term strategy to prevent Belarus from becoming a new fault line.  The “Belarus question” needs to become part of the larger transatlantic agenda, with specific policies and significant resource commitments to follow.

So today, rather than courting him, the West should confront Lukashenko with coordinated diplomatic and economic pressure while making a serious sustained investment in Belarusian grass-roots democratic movement, disseminating uncensored information, and funding NGO democracy initiatives.  This has to be an enduring policy commitment, for clearly there are limits as to what can be achieved short-term.

One country already adjusting its Belarusian policy is Poland, which has made a good-faith effort to bring Minsk out of isolation in the last couple of years.  Today, Poland is developing a two-track policy to put pressure on the Lukashenka regime, while also making a long-term investment in Belarusian democratic opposition.  This is the model that should define the joint American and European response to Lukashenko’s crackdown on pro-democracy forces.  Warsaw has important experiences to share, building on its earlier efforts to promote free media and civil society initiatives in the East.  Since December 2007, the Polish government has been the principal funder of Belsat TV, a free-media outlet under the auspices of the Polish public television TVP, staffed by journalists based in Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania.  Poland has also played host to two radio stations broadcasting into Belarus, the Belarusian radio station “Ratsya” established in 1999 and supported by the Polish government, and the European Radio for Belarus, operating since 2006 with funding from an international consortium.  The ERB broadcasts both over the conventional wave spectrum and the Internet.

Maintaining and expanding such free media outlets will be critical to the future of democratic opposition in Belarus.  The stations operating from Poland urgently need additional funding—something that the United States government, the European Union and private foundations should support, especially now as independent sources of information have been more persistently targeted by Lukashenka’s security forces.  Belsat offices in Minsk were raided by the KGB at the beginning of the current crackdown, and a number of journalists working with the station have been arrested and sentenced.

The policy of supporting grass-roots democratic forces will also require additional seed money for Belarusian NGOs.  Recently, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski announced the doubling of assistance to the opposition in Belarus, from PLN 20 million to PLN 40 million (about $13 million).  This will not be enough, but Sikorski’s decision should be a signal to other Western governments as to what needs to be done.  The transatlantic community should also invest in people-to-people contacts with Belarus at multiple levels.  The Polish government has already lifted visa fees for ordinary Belarusian citizens while imposing travel restriction on regime officials.  In addition, Warsaw has offered to open Polish universities to Belarusian students who have been expelled for pro-democracy activities back home.  There are plans to foster exchange programs for Belarusian opposition activists and conferences in support of Belarusian democracy, organized both by the Polish government and the NGO community.  In short, Warsaw has put forth a series of initiatives to pressure the Belarusian regime while trying to sustain the democratic momentum in the country.  This is the beginning of a long-term policy that, if supported by other democratic governments, holds a promise of success.

The Polish strategy now needs political and financial backing from Washington and Brussels.  Poland cannot do it alone, especially since its ethnic minority in Belarus remains vulnerable to pressure from Minsk.  The crisis requires a joint response from the United States and the European Union. We find ourselves in a moment of stark simplicity: the West needs to stand up for its core principles and meet Lukashenko’s brutality head-on.  It should do so long-term, persistently and with ample resources to back up the effort.  We need to leverage the Internet, peer social networks, programs run by NGOs and universities, as well as the entire gamut of traditional broadcast media in the United States and Europe to keep the “Belarus question” in focus.  The Poles have decades of experience building democratic foundations in the difficult 1970s and 1980s.  The United States and the European Union should draw from that experience.

German Marshall Fund