By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — In a vote riddled with fraud, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko on November 24 secured victory in a referendum aimed at allowing him to introduce a new, super-"presidential" constitution. Official figures claimed that as many as 70% of voters supported Lukashenko's demands for an extension of his term in office, for a new upper house of parliament stacked with his appointees and for a tame-cat Constitutional Court.
Under a November 4 court finding, the referendum did not have binding status. But Lukashenko immediately announced that he regarded his new constitution as being in force.
Lukashenko's moves to impose one-person rule have met resistance. For several weeks before the referendum almost daily demonstrations, some with many thousands of participants, took place before the parliament building in the capital, Minsk. Inside, large numbers of parliamentary deputies staged a sit-in.
Foreign governments were critical as well. The protests from official quarters in the west were weakened, however, by recollections of the line western leaders followed with regard to Russia in 1993.
At that time, western governments lent their support to President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to weaken the parliament and concentrate near-total power in the presidency. This support did not flinch even when Yeltsin launched a coup, illegally disbanding the parliament and suspending the Constitutional Court.
Lukashenko has clearly based his strategies on those followed by Yeltsin. Western governments, however, are much less happy with Lukashenko's initiatives. The key reason is that Lukashenko has yielded considerably less than his Russian counterpart to the demands of western financiers for strict monetarist economic policies.
Also embarrassing is the thoroughness of the Belarus president's assault on representative government. In Russia, Yeltsin created an upper house of parliament made up of provincial government chiefs who, if highly dependent on the central authorities, at least have to face popular election at some point. Lukashenko aims to stifle inconvenient legislation with an upper house a third of whose members will be direct presidential appointees. Another third of the members will be appointed by provincial governors, who in turn are appointed by the president.
On November 14, Lukashenko issued a decree sacking election commission chief Viktor Gonchar. According to the constitution, the head of the Central Election Commission is appointed by the parliament and may be removed only through a parliamentary vote.
Earlier, Gonchar had sworn that because of improper electoral procedures, he would refuse to endorse the results of the referendum. He noted that the ballot papers, which were run off by the presidential apparatus, had never been counted. They had been sent off to local electoral authorities directly, instead of via the Central Electoral Commission. Opportunities for fraud were almost without limit.
In the days after Gonchar's sacking, large anti-Lukashenko demonstrations in Minsk were violently attacked by Interior Ministry troops. On November 18, Prime Minister Mikhail Chigir resigned, citing disagreements with Lukashenko's policies.
The Constitutional Court ruled that Lukashenko had exceeded his powers in firing Gonchar. Opposition parliamentarians began collecting deputies' signatures on a petition to impeach the president. On November 20 the court agreed to a parliamentary request that it examine whether the president's actions were anti-constitutional. If the court ruled in the affirmative, Lukashenko's powers would be suspended until the parliament had voted on an impeachment motion.
With enough parliamentary supporters to block the two-thirds vote needed for impeachment, Lukashenko could afford to let events take their course. But the threat to the Belarus president had alarmed leaders of the Russian government. An emphatic supporter of closer links with Russia, Lukashenko is a prized ally of the Russian politicians and state officials — the overwhelming majority — who want to reintegrate other former Soviet republics into a Russian sphere of influence.
On the evening of November 21, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, accompanied by the speakers of both houses of the Russian parliament, made a surprise flight to Minsk. Early next day a compromise was announced. Lukashenko agreed that the referendum would not have binding force. The parliamentary leaders agreed to drop their impeachment moves.
Barely had the Russian mediators flown home, however, than the agreement started coming apart. The deputies of the parliament failed three times to ratify it. Lukashenko suggested strongly that he did not feel bound by its terms.
The conduct of the referendum confirmed many of the opposition's worst fears. A Ukrainian delegation reported 1000 poll violations in the Brest region alone. In Minsk, 53% of voters supposedly cast their ballots between 6 and 10 p.m. But in parliamentary by-elections being held simultaneously, only 8.9% voted between those times.
Democratic rights will now come under increasingly systematic attack. The potential for resistance of the existing liberal-nationalist opposition to Lukashenko is close to exhausted. Mostly supporters of Yeltsin-style capitalist "reform", the Belarus politicians who have helped to inspire and in part lead the opposition movement have few obvious attractions for the mass of citizens. Their promises of austerity and financial discipline spell further impoverishment for workers and peasants, whose living standards have already slipped dramatically.
It is not surprising that large numbers of ordinary Belarussians prefer Lukashenko, with his simple populist appeals and promises that closer ties to Russia will bring prosperity.
Lukashenko's erratic policies, however, are not aimed at defending working people. The president's measures add up to support for his key social base — the directors of state-owned enterprises, who run these firms to a large degree as their personal property.
The social formation that has the real potential to thwart Lukashenko's drive to dictatorship is not the pro-capitalist liberal intelligentsia but the working class. Sadly, the leaders of the country's mass labour movement body, the Federation of Belarussian Trade Unions, ceased long ago to mount more than passive opposition to Lukashenko.