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A Temporary ThawBelarus' president reaches out to the West, but can we trust him?

By Ilan GreenbergPosted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, at 7:11 AM ET

Alexsandr Lukashenko. Click image to expand. Alexsandr LukashenkoOn the ground in Belarus, Russia's politically tempestuous belle poitrine, it is hard to overlook the graveyards. There are the actual cemeteries—almost a third of the country's population died during World War II, including 90 percent of its Jews. And there is the metaphorical death mask wrapped around the face of Belarus society—with easily the most repressive government in Europe, Belarus' tattered pedestrians, empty stores, and crumbling apartment blocks look like they are in the authoritarian, unreconstructed Soviet dictatorship that the country has remained since independence nearly two decades ago.

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But during a trip to Belarus, I saw the way people in Belarus defy their history and their leader—the intransigent and at times buffoonish president, Alexsandr Lukashenko—to dig out an oasis of normality during their day-to-day lives. Master of a nation of 10 million highly educated citizens in the heart of Eastern Europe, Lukashenko may rule the public square but not the public conversation nor the public mood. In Minsk, picnic spots are carved out of every square foot of green space while rich social evenings are excavated out of loud, inclusive, beery conversations in bustling, well-managed restaurants. Through the sheer force of national will, Belorussians seem to push their government to an on-high abstraction.

It's an understandable impulse to push government away when national politics is ruled by capricious whim. Lukashenko has recently been giving off neck-jerking mixed messages. He has warned that Belarus will cut off all communication with Western countries if they fail to recognize the legitimacy of the Belarus parliamentary elections that were held Monday. (The United States has expressed concern about discrepancies in the voting process, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the "election fell short of democratic standards.") It is a draconian threat set against Lukashenko's unexpected promise, in response to overtures from the West, to substantially improve ties with the European Union and the United States if they only credential his election as democratic.

The West has also taken the election seriously. A high-ranking official at the EU Embassy in Washington, D.C., told an audience last week at Radio Free Europe: "The freer the election, the more likely Belarus will enjoy better relations with the West."

Lukashenko has been whipsawing Belarus observers all summer. Angered by American sanctions against his government, Lukashenko in May summarily expelled 10 U.S. diplomats. After their expulsion, the top American diplomat in the country, Jonathan Moore, held a press conference where, visibly angry, he taunted, "For the United States, the political prisoners in Belarus are much more important than the number of American diplomats in Belarus."

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Then in late August, Lukashenko released the country's last two political prisoners. The State Department cheered the move, declaring it had "a real potential for an improvement in relations with the United States." Yet the 54-year-old president promptly arrested 20 journalists for mocking him in a cartoon, and days later he declared his support for and "solidarity" with Russia's decision to invade its southern neighbor Georgia.

Beginning a long driving tour around Minsk one bright afternoon, my friends Olya, a waitress, and her husband, Sasha, a bullish-looking 35-year-old, swung by my hotel in a spanking-new BMW to pick me up for dinner. Sasha explained his business: importing cars from Germany. From Olya's back-seat squirm, I gathered Sasha's method of acquiring expensive cars was not a topic of further conversation. Both the car and Sasha purred from neighborhood to neighborhood. Sasha drove well, but Olya voiced increasingly angry corrections when Sasha made, at an accelerating pace, conversational wrong turns. (Olya: "Minsk is not one of the most beautiful cities in Europe"; "there is not a lot to do in Minsk"; "Jews do not control this country.") But when I asked about the Belarus government, there was no disagreement: Both scowled at me and promptly changed the subject.

A sizable number of Belorussians support Lukashenko, a skilled populist admired for standing up to the West and, when it suits him, to Putin. Yet he is often as much a source of embarrassment as an architect of national repression. Like some of the president's colleagues elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Lukashenko has the post-Soviet taste for verbal goose-stepping. He once called Hitler "not all bad." And before the 2006 presidential elections, he warned that anyone attending opposition protests would have their necks twisted "as one might a duck." Even more serious, Belarus is one of the world's most dangerous illegal arms exporters. Lukashenko has sold armaments to Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah.