Belarussian foils dictator-buster... for now

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4256816,00.html

Tested US foreign election strategy fails against Lukashenko

Ian Traynor in Moscow
Friday September 14, 2001
The Guardian

Michael Kozak specialises in winning other countries' elections. So when
he arrived in Minsk last year as the new American ambassador to Belarus,
it was clear that Washington was embarking on a strategy of trying to
topple the one-man regime of President Alexander Lukashenko through the
ballot box. 

The nine-month battle of wits between the American "democracy-builder" and
Europe's last hardline authoritarian ended in last Sunday's presidential
election. The regime confounded the west's plan to open up Belarus to free
elections, free markets and civil liberties with Mr Lukashenko proclaiming
a landslide victory. 

Mr Kozak, a veteran of Washington's campaigns to install sympathetic
leaders in Nicaragua, Panama and Haiti and undermine the Castro regime in
Cuba - he headed the US mission in Havana for four years before moving to
Minsk - has been left licking his wounds. 

The regime calls Mr Kozak a spy, the architect of the alleged "White
Stork" conspiracy to overthrow Mr Lukashenko. He may be expelled from
Minsk. 

But the Americans are unapologetic about their most systematic
intervention in an election in Europe, outside the Balkans, for years. 

The strategy repeated in exact detail the tactics the US used to help the
Serbian opposition overthrow Slobodan Milosevic a year ago, and the
Nicaraguan opposition unseat Daniel Ortega in 1990. 

It concentrated less on covert operations than on modern marketing and
branding methods of selling politics, organising election monitoring,
manipulating the media and aiming certain aid money in a subtly coercive
way. 

"The Americans think they've found the blueprint for getting rid of
dictators. They haven't. They're wrong," a senior west European diplomat
in Minsk said. 

Mr Lukashenko, whose secret police are all-pervasive, thwarted the
plan: he barred thousands of opposition election monitors, closed
opposition newspapers and harassed his challengers. 

Now, after funnelling tens of millions of dollars to the Belarus
opposition, engineering a united opposition coalition, funding websites,
newspapers and manipulative opinion polls, and tutoring a student
resistance movement, the Americans are taking stock of how to react to
another five years of him. 

In the wake of the western failure on Sunday, a row is brewing between the
Americans, who want to isolate the regime, and the Europeans, who regard
that as counter-productive. 

The meticulous western campaign to unseat Mr Lukashenko began seriously in
February, when a team of Serbian student leaders who had spearheaded the
insurgency against Milosevic arrived in Minsk to advise a young man called
Aleksei Shidlovsky and three of his friends on how to adapt the Belgrade
blueprint to Belarus. At the same time US state department experts on
Serbia and Belarus met to compare notes and draft a strategy. 

As a result Mr Shidlovsky, 23, set up the Zubr (Bison) student movement of
guerrilla pranksters, armed with US-funded websites, T-shirts, stickers
and satire. 

In the following months the Americans organised meetings of Belarussian
and Serbian student leaders in Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. 

"Otpor [the Serb student organisation] was the model for us," Mr
Shidlovsky said. "We have relations with the western embassies. We tell
them what we're doing and planning." 

Around the same time Mr Kozak embarked on a two-pronged strategy of
negotiating with the regime while building up the opposition, to try to
create "a template for a democratic process". 

The US offered Mr Lukashenko the normalisation of relations, military
cooperation, aid money and recognition in return for his establishing laws
and procedures to ensure a fair election. 

In addition, FBI and Russian detectives were to be admitted to Belarus to
investigate allegations of regime death squads abducting and assassinating
political opponents. 

Heads banged


In the talks on these issues Mr Lukashenko strung everyone along. "He
okayed the procedures, but never the substance. Ultimately all our
initiatives were rejected," a senior west European official said. 

So Mr Kozak concentrated on finding a credible challenger in an opposition
crippled by infighting and rival ambitions. 

In 1988 Mr Kozak was a special White House envoy in Panama intimately
engaged in the planning to get rid of General Manuel Noriega. In 1990 he
was instrumental in getting the fragmented anti-Sandinista opposition in
Nicaragua to unite behind a single election candidate. 

Last year it was American pollsters who found that President Vojislav
Kostunica was the sole opposition figure in Serbia who could beat Mr
Milosevic in an election, and US diplomats who then persuaded rival
figures such as Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian prime minister, to bury their
ambitions temporarily. 

Mr Kozak, supported by the influential figure of Hans-Georg Wieck, the
ambassador in Minsk for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, applied the same tactics in Belarus. 

The US International Republican Institute was asked to do new polls and
analyse other opinion data in Belarus. The US analysts found there was no
obvious figure to challenge Mr Lukashenko. 

The Americans then switched funding away from Semyon Domash, an opposition
leader they had previously supported, a western source said. 

"His funding was cut and the money tied to support for a real
coalition. Kozak has to be credited with making these changes." 

By law American aid money may not go to foreign political parties. But
Vladimir Goncharik, who was Mr Lukashenko main challenger on Sunday, does
not head a political party. About $50m (35m) in US aid has gone to various
Belarus opposition organisations in the past two years. 

Two days before the fragmented opposition agreed to unite behind Mr
Goncharik, its five main leaders were called to the US embassy to have
their heads knocked together. "It took a long time to settle on
Goncharik," Mr Shidlovsky said. "There were big rows." 

Western officials say that the meeting was the key moment in launching the
Goncharik bid, and that he was chosen as a safer, "less radical", option,
in the hope that part of Mr Lukashenko constituency would vote for him. 

Propaganda war


The same calculation coloured the earlier choice of Mr Kostunica to
challenge for the presidency in Belgrade, since many Milosevic supporters
were comfortable voting for a Serbian nationalist of pronounced
anti-western views. 

Another part of the Minsk strategy was to use opinion polls to shape
voters' perceptions. West European diplomats in Minsk say the Americans
paid anti-Lukashenko pollsters to doctor their survey data to create a
sense of momentum behind Mr Goncharik. 

One seasoned observer said that when he noticed abrupt increases in the
polled support for the challenger he knew the polls were unreliable. 

The propaganda war also entailed the student guerrillas plastering Minsk
with pithy slogans and stickers showing a lunatic Lukashenko under two
words which translate as "It's time to get rid of him" - a straight copy
of the successful student operation that covered Belgrade in posters of Mr
Milosevic under the slogan "He's Finished." 

But in Belarus, the secret police removed the stickers instantly. 

The month before the Belarus poll also brought a steady drip of
revelations about Mr Lukashenko alleged death squad from disaffected
regime insiders and KGB agents. The two investigators for the prosecutor's
office who made the death squad allegations in June were given political
asylum in the US. 

The US campaign has failed in the short-term, but could produce a delayed
reaction, as happened with Mr Milosevic, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru. 

"In my experience I can't think of anyone so obviously stealing an
election and lasting by more than a year or two," a western diplomat said. 

Mr Lukashenko admitted as much by saying a day after his claimed victory
that the revolution against him had collapsed. "Or at least been
postponed." 


Guardian Unlimited  Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001