Heart of darkness
A ray of hope from Belarusian exiles
LIKE a stub of candle, even a small bit of history is a comfort when you are in a dark room. Belarus looks pretty gloomy under Alyaksandr Lukashenka. An earthy collective-farm manager, he won the last freely contested election in 1994 against a representative of the old Soviet nomenklatura.
Many people (including your columnist) thought that any change was bound to be for the better. It wasn't. The new regime pioneered the kind of authoritarian rule, bombastic and occasionally murderous, that has now spread to Russia. In retrospect, 1990-94 looks like the heyday of Belarussian freedom.
With one exception. For a few months in 1918, Belarus enjoyed its first fragile taste of independence. As the Soviet regime consolidated its hold, the government fled, first to Lithuania, then to Prague.
The 90th anniversary of that first proclamation of statehood is on March 25th. It will be celebrated by both the opposition in Belarus and by the Belarusian National Rada (BNR) , an émigré assembly and government-in-exile that has doggedly maintained a vestigial existence for the past nine decades.
The idea of maintaining loyalty to a country that even nonagenarians would not remember might seem impossibly quixotic. But experience suggests that when governments-in-exile keep going, history rewards them.
The BNR now presents a poignant symbolic challenge to the regime at home, and is a focus of unity for the opposition.
Slowly, real-world politicians are beginning to take it more seriously. The BNR's president, a personable Canadian artist named Ivonka Survilla, is in Strasbourg this week to be formally received at the European Parliament, along with a bevy of Belarusians from both the diaspora and the domestic opposition.
From Economist.com, March 13, 2008 (excerpts)
This article appeared in
Belarusian Review, Vol. 20, No.1
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Edward Lucas
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