Neil Clark opines on the Presidential election in Belarus:
In the run-up to the elections on March 19th we can expect to be saturated with ‘last dictatorship in Europe’ style propaganda about Belarus- put about by EU fanatics and supporters of The Empire.
For a more objective, less hysterical picture of the political situation in the former Soviet republic, here’s a report from the widely respected British Helsinki Human Rights Group on the last Presidential elections in 2001.
Just in case you want to check it out yourself, here’s the BHHRG report that Clark refers to.
And, just as Neil feared – here’s a Last Dictatorship in Europe story from the International Herald Tribune.
Confused about who is right? Well, you might want to check out this wikipedia article about the BHHRG. Not pleasant reading for the folks back at BHHRG HQ.
The bottom line is that the BHHRG is an organisation that essentially goes around verifying every shoddy election it can find, particularly if it happened in the former Soviet Union. You name the post-Soviet dictator, and BHHRG’s election monitors and policy wonks will rush proclaim him as a democratic paragon of virtue who would sooner pull the wings off butterflies than falsify election results.
Anyway, back to Belarus. The reason why you will see so many ‘Last Dictatorship in Europe’ articles in the coming weeks is because Belarus is the last dictatorship in Europe. President Alexander Lukashenko is a man who actively represses opposition to his rule through violence and fraud at the ballot box. Just last week, Lukashenko’s security forces beat up and arrested one of the three opposition candidates in the upcoming election. That is democracy, Belarus style.