If anyone needs more testimony that the totalitarian rule of Alexander Lukashenko is a threat to European stability and progress, then this week's feature interview with Terry Boesch, a U.S. professor who was unceremoniously expelled from Belarus without explanation, should tip the scales.
Here's an individual who did nothing but teach law to university students, only to hear a knock on his door late one evening. The message: pack your bags and leave. (Quite fittingly, he couldn't go anywhere since the visa registration office was in possession of his passport and visa.) As he explained to The Baltic Times, many high-level Belarusian officials privately confessed to him in the two days he waited to be escorted to the border that they were puzzled by the decision. Boesch, after all, had not been on anyone's radar screen.
On the one hand, what is happening in Belarus defies logic. In an era of integration and ease of travel, of globalization and strengthening contacts, here is a nation 's one bordering three EU members 's that is removing each and every semblance of an open society and battening down the hatches. Stories about oppression are filtering out of Belarus on a weekly basis now.
Yet on the other hand, what we see transpiring just across the border is all too familiar. It is called appeasement, and it is politics at which Europe is exceptionally good.
For the sake of Russian oil and gas, EU leaders are distancing themselves from the gradual slide of Belarus into a North Korea-type pariah. The only real support base Lukashenko has is in Moscow, but instead of leaning on the Kremlin, European leaders 's particularly German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder 's are closing their eyes to the situation.
The North European Gas Pipeline is a case in point. This $10 billion project, which will connect St. Petersburg and Germany underwater, will ensure direct supplies of natural gas to Russia's most reliable customer: Germany. The latter wants it so bad that it neglected to consider a cheaper pipeline through the Baltics and Poland, its EU partners and neighbors.
Granted, every nation must first and foremost provide for its future energy security, but the northern pipeline is politically unique in that it sacrifices short-term stability in term of long-term needs. Relations between Belarus and the Kremlin are extremely fragile, and it is important for Europe to recognize that and exploit it. If Schroeder wanted to push his friend Vladimir Putin on the issue of Belarus, he could have. Russia, after all, needs the new pipeline even more than Germany. Instead, when EU leaders meet with Putin there is more talk on Kaliningrad transit and visa-free travel for Russians than on elementary human rights in the heart of Europe.
This situation has, in fact, become so lopsided that only people who are outspoken about the horrors of the Lukashenko dictatorship are American visitors, such as Condoleezza Rice, John McCain, and Terry Boesch. When are European leaders going to wake up to the bulldozer on their eastern front.
