Belarus: the Rise of Another Maidan

   Partido Comunista de España

   Secretaría de Relaciones Internacionales

   c/Olimpo 35 (28043) Madrid

   The presidential elections held last August 9 in Belarus, won by Alexandr Lukashenko (who was supported by the Communist Party and other left-wing forces), have revived the old plans of Washington and Brussels to destabilize the country. Both the United States and the European Union have been quick to discredit the elections –refraining from presenting evidence to prove their claims, and encouraging protests in the country to bring down the Minsk government. In fact, the United States and its client countries (Poland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic) have been preparing this destabilization for months, flying the false flag of freedom and democracy that they have raised at their convenience on other occasions.

   The campaigns against Belarus go back a long way, describing Lukashenko as "the last dictator of Europe", disregarding the popular support he maintains and the holding of elections –an annoying evidence that is discredited with the interventionist script: if the election results are to the liking of Washington, the elections are impeccable; if not, the elections have been manipulated by a government that must be overthrown. The North American and European obsession with Belarus comes from the fact that the country has preserved a good deal of the Soviet social conquests, such as healthcare and education, as well as public ownership of most of the country's companies. However, neoliberal plans and imperialist ambition are not new: sanctions and pressure from Western governments date back to the Bush years, and are part of the destabilization plans and violent changes of government that took place in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics.

   In this new crisis, the involvement of Poland, Lithuania and the Czech Republic is notorious. It is also sparked off, in the background, by the action of the United States, with the "information" from Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty (where corrupt opposition banker Viktar Babarika has even been described as a "philanthropist), the financing of the country's right-wing and liberal opposition, and the training of intervention groups to create chaos. The most extreme Western sectors have even called for NATO’s intervention in the Belarusian crisis.

   The conservative media, along some left-wing forces that have given in to the propaganda campaign hatched in Washington and Brussels, have described the protests after the elections as peaceful, which does not correspond to reality. Although other relevant issues require clarification (such as the presence of Wagner's Russian mercenaries arrested in Minsk, whose presence cannot be ruled out as being the result of a plan by the Ukrainian secret services), Western governments demand passivity from the Belarusian police, considering all protests to be peaceful despite the evident actions of Nazi groups and far-right detachments, complementing the protests of the liberal opposition to wreak havoc in Minsk and other cities. This has even led to the creation of groups of women dressed in white, thus replicating the campaigns against Cuba, trying to create another Maidan that justifies the application of new sanctions, political and diplomatic harassment. The goal is to eventually use this as a trigger to overthrow the Lukashenko government.

   Despite the declarations of Washington and Brussels, which are always garnished with hypocritical democratic demands, the plan promoted by the United States and supported by the satellite governments of Poland, Lithuania and the Czech Republic has the ambition to repeat the successful script applied in the coup in Ukraine in 2014 –which brought a far-right government to power and unleashed repression against the Ukrainian left, as well as war in the east of the country.

   The European Union collaborated and gave logistical and diplomatic support to the coup plotters of Kiev in 2014, supported a government with neo-Nazi ministers and did not condemn the subsequent Ukrainian elections held in a climate of terror, with far-right gangs lynching and murdering members of left-wing parties. The EU still shows no concern towards the humanitarian disaster its partners have turned Ukraine into, and it doesn’t condemn the regimes of Georgia or Azerbaijan either. Come 2020, it considers that the Belarusian elections have not been “neither free nor fair”, although it has refrained from presenting any evidence. The European Union is no longer credible and it cannot present itself as a judge for good democratic practices, especially because some of its member states, such as the Baltic countries, still deny citizenship rights to a part of their population.

   The Belarusian crisis and the new Maidan attempt have nothing to do with freedom and democracy. In the background of it all are the United States, which continues its military deployment in Eastern Europe, harassing Russia, while at the same time it stimulates hotspots of crisis on the Russian borders, destabilizing inconvenient governments to complete the siege. The US movements have two goals: on the one hand, to break the political union between Moscow and Minsk, which intend to advance towards a unified state, sabotaging the Russian strategic project of resuming historical ties with the former Soviet republics, and eventually imposing a client regime in Minsk, like they did in Ukraine; on the other hand, to hinder the development of the new Chinese Silk Road, which has one of its main branches in Belarus to ensure transit and commercial development between China and Europe. The old miserable US imperialism has not been turned into freedom.

   The Communist Party of Spain demands that the European Union not contribute to the destabilization of Belarus, and that the member countries accept the results of the presidential elections. The PCE also believes that the European Union must work to build a new climate of cooperation in Eastern Europe, without the harassing operations and plans to overthrow governments that are decided in Washington. At the same time, the Communist Party of Spain condemns the hypocrisy and interventionism of the United States in Belarus and in Europe: disregarding the rules of coexistence between countries and following the old imperial practices, they try to overthrow governments to impose client regimes and maintain their hegemony over the European continent.