Meet Alexander Lukashenko, the current president of Belarus and the head of "Europe's last dictatorship".
Belarus is an East European country that for some reason has been a strategic prize for some of history's biggest douchebags. Think of esteemed gentlemen such as Napoleon, Hilter, and Stalin.
Part of the explanation for this is location, location, location. Belarus is conveniently situated in a region that kind of straddles the European East-West divide. It is bordered by Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest, and Russia to the northeast.
For Russia, it’s important to have a friendly state on its doorstep. On the other hand, during the Second World War, the Germans viewed conquering Belarus as an avenue they could exploit to launch a full-frontal assault on Russia.
In the end, the Russians won out. But not before the Nazis had successfully obliterated over 2 million Belarusians.
Russia proceeded to exert control of Belarus. As Russia does. And look, its not like that was a particularly difficult thing for them to do. The Belarussians had no real national identity of their own. They had never been a unified state nor had never had they experienced anything even resembling democracy at any point in their bitter history.
Besides, the Soviets gave them stability. Sure, most Belarusians were dirt poor but after years of war, you'd probably take peace with a sprinkling of poverty over deadly conflict too if that was the deal was on offer.
All that said, just because they had been decimated by their less friendly neighbours and been subject to loony Russian dictators for years, didn't mean the Belarusians couldn't raise up a strong man of their own.
Enter Mr. Lukashenko. Let's call him AL, for short.
As with most erhum...strong...leaders, a lot of their early history is fairly unclear.
From what we can tell, AL was born in 1954 and grew up without a father. This led to him being teased by his schoolmates for having an unmarried mother.
Kids are mean. Eastern European ones moreso.
Anyway, none of that stopped him from graduating college, although some of his former classmates recall him being found wanting in the intelligence department.
Nonetheless, AL managed to land himself a crummy job as a prison guard before rising through the political ranks through a combination of manipulation and sheer luck.
In 1994, AL was elected as the President of Belarus, a post he has held ever since.
Of course, he runs the cowntry like his own personal fiefdom. Who wouldn't?
It was painfully obviously from the get-go where he was steering this ship. His first acts as President were to make it really hard for anyone wanting to criticize his government to do so. Or to live really.
AL has blacklisted artists and musicians who are considered to be subversive. Demonstrating is an offence that is punishable by a thorough beating by the KGB. Oh yeah, they have the KGB in Belarus too.
Weirdly, clapping is banned. This was a reaction to a 2011 protest that involved clapping in public.
In addition to not being able to clap in public, Belarusians also can’t be too quiet in public either. Silent demonstrations are banned under a law that prohibits unsanctioned "action or lack of action" in public places. A literal case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
Most people in Belarus don't have access to independent media and so public opinion is generally curated by the state-run media, which is very pro-Russian and anti-"West".
The general rule in the capital, Minsk, is that unless something is expressly allowed by law, don't do it. And this goes for everything from jaywalking to sexual orientation. The result is a general and pervasive sense of fear as many activities lie in that unregulated grey area.
As for our mans AL, he's the best thing since sliced bread in Belarus. Known affectionately as Batka (meaning “Big Daddy”), he has ruled with just the right amount of madness and firmness to ensure power will be firmly in his wrinkled old man grip for some time to come. At least up until now.
AL loves sports and often invites professional hockey teams (his favourite sport) to play with and against him. Of course, AL's odds of victory are exponentially increased that all his opponents are issued with threats of jail time or worse if they win.
Unsurprisingly, AL always wins. What an athlete.
Like a certain President, AL has issues with his hair. To the extent that state TV is forbidden from filming him from behind, to not expose his hair-piece. Which is a tough task when said state TV must daily broadcast his meetings and movements.
A true man of the people, AL lives on a private estate, which he...expropriated, let’s just say...from foreign ambassadors in 1998 by cutting off their water and electricity. AL also owns a plane once owned by Saparmurat Niyazov (a cat you may be familiar with if you’ve read enough of these emails) and watches worth several times his salary.
But, keeping that same energy, AL believes that the president should be a "conservative person" and so he avoids using electronic gadgets like iPads or iPhones. For what is life without balance?
AL has 2 sons from his ex-wife, who he separated from after having an affair with his physician. The heart wants what it wants, I guess. In a fall from grace to grass, his ex-wife is now a milkmaid in a distant village.
The result of the affair is a 3rd son, with whom AL is healthily obsessed. Kolya, the love-child who is thought to be AL's heir, routinely accompanies his father to official meetings and state visits. He even went to Hugo Chávez's funeral in Venezuela and met Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican.
You could read all this and think that Belarus is just another dictatorship where the dude in charge leeches off the people, getting fatter and richer while the nation waits for a coup or the despot's death.
This is sort of true. But not quite.
For one thing, by reselling subsidised oil and gas from Russia at a hefty mark-up, and by selling weapons to equally unsavoury regimes in Sudan, Iraq, Venezuela, and Syria, AL has made sure that Belarus is economically stable.
Health care and education are also free, which is a pretty huge deal when you consider how much of your adult life is spent worrying about financing these things, for yourself and/or for other people.
Still still...we know you can rig elections (which AL has done sublimely over the years), but you can't rig the economy.
There are problems.
While the "official:" (read untrue) unemployment rate is 1%, the reality is that 80% of the workforce are on 1-year contracts. This means that they can, and indeed have been, sacked at any time with little justification.
And while health care is free, it's recommended to give health care workers something to make them “look after you (better)”. If you get my drift.
Belarus has also struggled to sell its outdated tractors and trucks and to make matters worse, Russia has begun to remove some of its subsidies. Not great when your whole economy sort of depends on them.
Probably the biggest sign that things are going downhill is the fact that Belarus has the highest rate of suicide and alcoholism in Europe.
Of course, the last stat could just mean Belarussians know how to party like no other Europeans can.
For a long time, people were disgruntled, but not quite desperate enough to rebel. The opposition was, and still is to some degree, small, divided, and demoralised.
And the EU never bothered to do anything about AL either: he was treated like a bad smell in the corner you try to ignore. Brutal, but not brutal enough to trigger sanctions. Just the way he liked it probably.
And then 2020 happened.
As the coronavirus hit around the world, AL joined the illustrious league of leaders like Juan Bolsanaro, John Magufuli, and that guy with the hair who either outright denied the pandemic or had bizarre suggestions for handling it. AL suggested that a combination of vodka, saunas, and plain old hard work would be effective remedies to the illness.
Suffice to say, ideas like that don’t exactly signal that to the public that the country’s public health measures will help keep them alive. Especially not in an election year.
In early August, Belarus went to the polls. This is widely accepted as a box-ticking exercise. Certainly for AL himself, after rigging winning so many elections in the past, was pretty confident that it would be business as usual.
Part of business as usual traditionally involved hog-tying political opponents and throwing them into the back of the dingiest dungeons in the land. And then people would be scared and just allow AL to win in peace. Basically.
For some reason, this time, the arrest of 2 opposition candidates led to the creation of a coalition of three women closely involved in those campaigns.
One of the ladies, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya - a 37-year-old English teacher, registered as a presidential candidate in place of her now incarcerated husband, Sergey. “Everyone was drawn to the mother(s)” as the ladies conducted a tour of the country where hordes of people, frustrated by the decades-long tyranny of AL, thronged to see them.
You know something shady is about to pop off in the booths when no independent observers are invited to monitor an election. And this was the case on voting day in Belarus. Understandably, fears of vote manipulation and cheating ran high from the onset.
Well, it wasn’t long before reports of irregularities and cheating brought substance to those fears. It also didn’t help the situation that there was a nationwide internet blackout as the votes were counted - presumably to muzzle any reports to the outside world of what was going on.
Soon after the voting stations were closed, the results of exit polls were released. What a surprise, and a complement to Belarussian statisticians that these results were almost identical to the official results published the next day!
AL had won again, with a very healthy and very realistic 80% of the vote. Mrs. Tikhanovskaya, despite all the popular support, had only obtained 10%.
As the old saying goes: Hell hath no fury like a woman cheated out of the presidency. Mrs. Tikhanovskaya maintained that she had actually won 60-70% of the vote. I’m not sure where she got these figures from, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she was on to something.
To her credit, she tried to use the official formal channels to challenge the results. But she was promptly arrested - which kind of tells you all you need to know really. She was released after a few hours but fearing for her life and the welfare of her kids, she fled to Lithuania.
Meanwhile, outrage at AL’s brazen theft of the election resulted in a groundswell of pissed off protestors on the streets of Minsk and other cities. The police responded by firing tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades at them but this doesn’t seem to have worked.
In clashes between law enforcement and citizens, details of alleged police brutality have surfaced. Many detainees have been badly beaten and forced into overcrowded jails. Luckily, unlike in the ’90s when AL took power, there’s social media to expose these abuses of power.
Anyhow, these arrests and images spurred a fresh wave of demonstrations wherein people gathered at jails, police stations, and detention centres to demand news about their arrested comrades.
Momentum on their side, opposition leaders launched a coordinating council to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power. This body is made up of civil society activists, lawyers, respected cultural figures, and pretty much anybody who is somebody in society. You know, to have dialogue with AL. Because apparently, that's a solution to a decades-long political crisis. Who would have thought?
Another surprise: AL didn’t like this idea. With the kind of stubbornness that leads one to don a woolen scarf in 30+ degree celsius heat while wearing a full-on suit, he refused to negotiate with the new council. In fact, some council members were later arrested on charges of plotting to unseat the government and seize power. Sounds vaguely familiar...
None of this has stopped the protests and it seems that the tide of civil unrest may be rising against AL for once. At some state-owned enterprises around the country, workers have gone on strike. AL was even publicly booed on a visit to a tractor factory. Staff at the national broadcaster have also walked out, joining the protests.
The demonstrations continue TO THIS DAY, with each passing day bringing news of more arrests and detentions.
2020 has been a strange year, to put it mildly. We wait and see what will happen but who knows, the Belarussian people may have some rare good news sooner rather than later.
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