What Ukraine’s Protesters Learned From Belarus
When people first started gathering in Kievs Independence Square last fall, a casual observer might have written off the protests as a repeat of what happened to protest movements in Belarus and in Russia over the past several yearsand understandably so. The three countries are close-knit; Ukraine and Belarus might as well be Russian satellite states. The Eurasian Economic Union that Putin plans to launch in 2015 will (if he has his way) consist of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The Belarusian secret police are still called the KGB, and Russian Patriarch Kirill I even called the three countries the core of the Russian World today.
But there are important differences. Like in Ukraine, thousands of people repeatedly took to the streets in Russia and in Belarus to protest election fraud and government abuses. Then their governments cracked down hard, injuring and imprisoning hundreds of peaceful protesters on charges of hooliganism and worse. Those protests dissipated and the authoritarian governments remained. Whats happening in Ukraine is more violent and is already bringing more political change than ever happened in either Belarus or Russia. The U.S. and E.U. might impose sanctions toward Ukraine, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has signalled that he may be open to holding early elections, and the Ukrainian parliament has voted to end the crackdown. The strength of the Euromaidan protests stems in part from the experience of watching neighboring protest movements disappear. Ukrainians have seen authoritarianism win time and again and remember the success of the 2005 Orange Revolution, which brought Yanukovych's rival Viktor Yushchenko to power.
Belarus, Ukraines fellow satellite state and Europes last dictatorship, is a worst-case scenario for what happens to protest movements in former Soviet states. In December 2010, President Alexander Lukashenko won his fourth presidential term by rigging the elections to give himself 80 percent of the vote. During Lukashenkos presidency, the former Soviet republic has never held a poll seen as fair by international monitors, according to the BBC. Massive protests broke out in Minsks very own Independence Square, and five opposition presidential candidates were jailed. Like in Ukraine, protesters stormed government buildings and were beaten down by riot police. Lukashenkos government outlawed unsanctioned street protests, and the people responded by staging silent protests. Then Lukashenko banned those too, and continued to arrest hundreds. Belarus now resembles something akin to a prison colony, as Belarusian journalist Andrej Dynko put it.
What happened in December 2010 in Minsk is today happening in the Ukrainian Maidan, Belarusian activist and politician Andrei Sannikov remarked at a meeting in Norway earlier this month. Sannikov was one of the opposition candidates who ran against Lukashenko in 2010, and now Lukashenkos government is trying to reappropriate the 2010-2011 protest movement as part of a patriotic Belarusian narrative. The Ministry of Culture is financing a film, Abel, that will tell the story of the struggle between two Belarusian brothers during the unrest following Lukashenkos election; one of them supports Lukashenko, the other the oppositionand guess which one is Cain. The film is a government-sponsored response to a Polish movie, Viva Belarus!, that tells the story of the 2010 youth uprisings. Abel promises to give an objective view of the protests and started filming in Minsk last month.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116692/what-ukraines-protesters-learned-belarus
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)weeks ago had an event in DC..come to Belarus, do business in Belarus! Lots of international
trade lawyers were invited. The way they were selling it..it was all blue skies and smooth sailing for
everyone, so please come along. Viva Belarus, indeed...sheesh.
K&R
bemildred
(90,061 posts)---
As it turns out, political scientists have figured out some of the fundamental reasons that conflicts like Syrias and Ukraines are likely to descend into civil war. Poverty, horizontal inequality, and state weakness are factors commonly associated with the onset of armed conflict, and those are certainly present in Ukraine, Erica Chenoweth, a professor at the University of Denver who studies the use of violence by anti-government movements, told me. But the decision to use arms is not automatic, nor is it inevitable. Opposition leaders need to make a choice to direct their movement away from protests and towards military force.
To see why, lets focus on the second of Chenoweths conditions, horizontal inequality which means economic inequality between social groups. Thats certainly true in Ukraine, where the ethnic Russians in East, generally government supporters, tend to be wealthier than the generally anti-government West, home of ethnic Ukrainians:
(map)
But its not just inequality between groups that makes violence more likely; its also inequality inside groups. Political scientists Patrick M. Kuhn and Nils B. Weidmann tested a large sample of civil conflicts, and found that inequality inside rebel aligned movements was strongly correlated with a dissident ethnic groups ability to escalate militarily. The reason, simply put, is that when rebel elites have a large group of poor recruits to draw on, its easier to find soldiers. As within-group economic inequality increases, the proportion of poor increases, which expands the rebels reservoir of potential recruits, in their words.
Thats true in Ukraine. As the map above indicated, Kyiv the capital and heart of the protests is the richest area of the country. So youve got a movement led in part by central elites, though its worth noting that people have been traveling to Kyiv for months to join the demonstrations, with the support of the poorest part of the country.
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/02/20/3311241/ukraine-just-avoided-syrias-fate/