EUROPEAN STATES are cranking up pressure on Belarus’s authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko as he grapples with the most severe economic crisis of his 17-year rule.
The European Union is expected to impose further sanctions on Belarusian businesses next week. And the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe – the world’s largest regional security organisation – has issued a scathing report on Mr Lukashenko’s crackdown on opponents following his allegedly rigged re-election last December.
This comes as the man the United States once dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” faces growing public protest over an economic slide. The turmoil has stripped the rouble currency of more than one-third of its value, sent interest rates and the prices of staple goods spiralling and triggered bouts of panic buying.
Mr Lukashenko, the former state farm boss who portrays himself as the guarantor of Belarusian stability and independence, has been forced to seek emergency funding from the International Monetary Fund and Russia. But both are imposing tough conditions on any help.
Belarus will become more isolated when the EU freezes the assets of at least one firm, but probably several on Monday. It may also lengthen a list of the president’s allies who are barred from travelling to the EU. Washington last week extended similar sanctions against the country of almost 10 million people.
Some analysts blame the economic crisis on Mr Lukashenko’s public spending before last year’s election, which sparked street protests from critics who said it was rigged. Riot police dispersed protests and arrested hundreds, including some opposition leaders who were subsequently jailed.
“The fact-finding mission indicates the seriousness, duration and scale of gross and systematic human rights violations since the events of December 19th,” the regional security organisation siad in its report on the post-election trouble. “This concerns not only a long list of individual cases of great concern, as ‘political detainees’, but a system of social control, by fear, harassment, torture and blackmail, phone tapping, false evidence and forced confessions.”
Belarus refused to co-operate with the fact-finding mission from the regional security organisation, which the Republic will chair next year. Russia is offering to help Mr Lukashenko but wants him to sell key industrial assets to Russian businessmen in return. The IMF has encouraged Minsk to liberalise its economy.
“They are already . . . snapping their teeth, waiting for us to fall,” Mr Lukashenko said yesterday of western nations, while blaming journalists for fuelling the crisis and denouncing protesters who are co-ordinating actions online.
“Now they are using slightly new methods to try and shake up Belarus – including . . . that trash called the internet. This is a new approach honed in certain countries,” he said.
Mr Lukashenko has said he would monitor opposition social networks and “hit them so hard they won’t even have time to escape across the border”.
