2020, like 2019, is turning out to be a year of rolling crises and protests – floods, raging forest fires, melting ice sheets, plagues of locusts and other symptoms of the climate emergency are focusing minds as conservative as the CBI to the need for the government to deliver a green overhaul of the economy. Add to that a deadly global pandemic as the backdrop to unrest in countries as different as the United States, Belarus, Thailand, Hong Kong, Israel and Occupied Territories – from Black Lives Matter to Extinction Rebellion, anti-corruption, civil rights and pro-democracy campaigns – this is shaping up to be a year of citizen revolt. For some there are shades of 1968 – especially in the anti-police violence protests, but there are also echoes of the protests against the impacts of austerity across Europe and the US from 2010-12, or the turmoil of the Arab Spring around the same time.
Of course, that term ‘Arab Spring’ leaves a bitter aftertaste for millions who struggled for more democratic participation and basic human rights across the Middle East. Such hopes were ultimately crushed by armed force – from Egypt’s military/police state to Libya and Syria’s devastating civil wars, sometimes with other nations playing a decisive role.
In retrospect, the anti-austerity marches in the west of that period, such as Occupy Wall Street, helped popularise the discourse around inequality (the so-called 1% versus the 99%), but other long-term victories are harder to identify. Yet 2020 also recalls the sudden outpouring of civil protest and defiance in 1989 against the authoritarian rule in the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe where outcomes were very different. In that year the fall of regimes in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary showed that mostly peaceful revolutions were possible – if enough people took to the streets and the army or police refused to shoot unarmed civilians. Uprisings in Romania and later in the Baltic states saw more people hurt or killed, but also resulted in regime change.
However, the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 in China showed that mass protests could also be ruthlessly crushed by military force. So, what of the current protests in Belarus? After weeks of unrest tens of thousands of Belarusians have yet to be intimidated off the streets. Arrests, beatings and torture by President Alexander Lukashenko’s heavily-armed henchmen in balaclavas have not yet dampened the protests that have paralysed the country. Significantly, this peaceful movement has been led predominantly by women, in an echo of anti-government protests in Lebanon at the end of 2019. This may, for now, have checked an even more violent response by the authorities to a revolt against a swaggering, ‘ridiculous’ and dictatorial President. This revolt was finally sparked by Lukashenko’s arrogant dismissal of concerns around the Covid-19 pandemic as “mass psychosis” as it gripped his country (sound familiar?) and his blatant rigging of a sixth election on 9th August. Germany, along with other EU nations, condemned what was described as the “so-called presidential elections” conducted in a “flagrant violation of all internationally recognised standards”. Lukashenko claimed to have won 80% of the vote against his opponent Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, now in self-imposed exile (to protect her children) in Lithuania. Evidence of efforts to control media coverage is shown in the expulsion of foreign correspondents and blocking of foreign news outlets by the Belarus authorities who are also scrambling to fill the hole left by domestic journalists, many of whom are striking in support of the protesters. With opposition leaders in prison or exile where does the protest movement go from here? Time will tell, but three options seem possible at this point.
Firstly, and most likely, Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime will wear (and beat) the protesters down – arresting any visible leaders of the largely decentralised rallies, especially when numbers dwindle. The internet has been blocked in Belarus and while, for now, activists note that “connection is getting worse while the crowds are getting bigger” demonstrations cannot go on indefinitely. More bloody police or military action against demonstrators is highly likely – where the regime follows the playbook of China, Iran or Egypt and ruthlessly suppresses dissent. Fear of being tortured or killed is a powerful deterrent to public protests, especially with the sophisticated technology at the disposal of today’s security apparatus, but it requires loyal and callous soldiers or police to turn weapons on thousands of men, women and children. Batons, tear gas and water cannon perhaps, but using machine guns or tanks on unarmed citizens takes the kind of deep ideological indoctrination of security forces that Belarus may lack. East German soldiers and police faced the same dilemma in 1989 and decided to let the protests carry on.
A second possible outcome is that the regime will make some kind of accommodation with the protesters – perhaps requiring President Alexander Lukashenko to step down and be replaced by another leader, while pacifying citizens with the promise of another election. As BU lecturer and former BBC correspondent Mat Charles has shown in ‘Europe’s last dictator’ – Lukashenko is not the type of leader to stand aside peacefully. In power since 1994 and filmed striding around the capital Minsk with an assault rifle during the protests – Lukashenko seems more determined than ever to cling to power. With a critical mass of opposition, a third outcome remain possible.
If rallies increase in number and strength and are combined with industrial action or other acts of civil disobedience the regime may yet crumble, paving the way for peaceful and free elections. This outcome presumes that Russia does not intervene on Lukashenko’s behalf, nervous of the impact of regime change, as the Soviets did in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. And we do not have to looks far back as the era of the Iron Curtain to see where one autocratic regime has come to the aid of another – Saudi Arabia’s military assistance (in some cases using British armoured cars and other weapons) in the crushing of the Pearl Uprising in Bahrain in 2011 is one of several examples. Other forms of intervention from Russia are highly likely (including ‘Intelligence cooperation’) and direct military involvement is likely to remain a last resort as this may simply unite Belarusians against their Eastern neighbour. A civil war of the kind that convulsed Ukraine is also regarded as less likely, given the more homogenous linguistic, ethnic and cultural make up of Belarus. Political predictions are a fool’s game, but the outcome of this mass movement should be clear in a matter of weeks, if not days.
David McQueen
@damcqueen
Images by By Homoatrox – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93684777
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