Heated squabble over Belarus marks beginning of the year

  • 2011-01-05
  • By Linas Jegelevicius

KLAIPEDA - The 2011 Year of the Rabbit, suggesting a serene start, in Lithuania quite unexpectedly took off with a fierce verbal squabble between two heads of state -  former Lithuanian president Valdas Adamkus and his successor, Dalia Grybauskaite. In an interview to the daily Lietuvos Rytas, Adamkus, who is usually soft-spoken, lashed out at Grybauskaite, calling Lithuania’s foreign policy towards Belarus “a catastrophe.” Within a few hours, Grybauskaite backlashed at her predecessor, asserting “The catastrophe is not the friendliness shown to a neighboring country and its Alexander Lukashenko, but the turned back to the country ten years ago.”

“I particularly painfully feel the tension between Lithuania and Poland. Obviously, the foundation of our friendship that we were trying consistently to strengthen began to crumble. I think we have overreached ourselves trying to please Alexander Lukashenko. Simply speaking, we have made fools of ourselves. Our foreign policy towards Belarus has been struck by a catastrophe,” Adamkus complained. He claimed that, over one and a half years, Lithuania, as if with its own hands, was ruining the trust of the regional countries. “I will not speak about such non-essential, though unpleasant signs of weakening international authority, such as the fact that our heads of state have not even been invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

However, it is bad that in the international arena, more and more often Lithuania is written off as an attention-unworthy country. For example, the Economist declares that the Baltic region this year will be just a geographical term, without political and economic content. Estonia has not only introduced the euro, but it prefers being called not Baltic, but a northern country, willing to be measured against Finland and Sweden. Generally speaking, Lithuania’s situation is rather strange. It is unclear what goals our country pursues and what its foreign policy is on the whole,” Adamkus said, slamming his successor.

Speaking about Leo LT’s dismantling, Adamkus expressed his doubts concerning the necessity of the action. “Our energy policies have experienced a total fiasco. What are we proud of? Are we proud of the fact that we have dismantled Leo LT? Is it worth rejoicing over ruining something which we have been long and hard at creating? Were our concerns justified when we held its controlling interest? However, now, we are sitting by the cracked tub. While we do that, the Russians, with their sleeves rolled up, are already building a nuclear power plant at our border, in the Kaliningrad region. Meanwhile, Belarusians are promising to undertake this kind of a construction in Vilnius’ proximity,” Adamkus said.

Asked what awaits Lithuania this year, he responded, “People are leaving their Motherland because they do not want to live in it the way they live in it now. Our inhabitants will keep emigrating until they start to believe that the situation starts to improve.”
On Jan. 3 Grybauskaite, while meeting Audronius Azubalis, minister of Foreign Affairs, rebutted Adamkus’ criticism over Belarusian policies, emphasizing that the real catastrophe is not the friendliness shown to the neighboring country and its Lukashenko, but the turned back to the country ten years ago.

Lithuania took over the Chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on Jan. 1, 2011. Audronius Azubalis, foreign minister of Lithuania, became the new Chairperson-in-Office of the OSCE. He had expressed his deep regret over the non-extension of the mandate of the OSCE office in Minsk by the Belarusian authorities. Both Grybauskaite and Azubalis discussed the situation in post-election Belarus. Lithuania’s head of state approved the initial OSCE conclusions that state that Belarus “has to go a long way in order to correspond to its commitments to the OSCE’s democracy expansion standards.” Once again, Grybauskaite stressed that she denounces the exercise of disproportionate physical force against the demonstrators. “Belarus’ isolation has not yielded desirable results. Belarusian authorities’ actions against the representatives of its own society and mass media people that participated in the protests, all the arrests and physical coercion, encumber our collaboration with the Belarusian authorities, but not with Belarus’ people,” Grybauskaite said, repeating her stance on the events in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. She intends to address the European Commission and the EU’s Council of Head of States, asking the institutions to ease up granting of EU visas for Belarus’s citizens.

After the meeting with the foreign minister, Linas Balsys, Grybauskaite’s spokesman was quick to say, “The steps that have been taken towards Belarus during President Grybauskaite’s tenure are the first contacts to have noticeably contributed to the little democratization steps in the country.” In the press conference, Azubalis, a member of the ruling Motherland-Christian Democrat Party, disagreed with Adamkus’ estimations. “I do not know whether it is possible to name the current Lithuanian policies by such a drastic word. I do not know whether our constant support for Belarusian opposition is worthy of such a word [catastrophe]. I do not know whether our 40 short-term and four long-term observers sent to Belarus are also worthy of the same word,” he said.

While the verbal squabble between the presidents was still simmering, a belligerent Grybauskaite quickly moved on another target, instigating furor, this time in the homeland, in an interview with Prognosis 2011, asserting, “We are becoming a state governed by oligarchs and the criminal world.” She went on, adding, “Our main task for 2011, and not only for the year, is to fight the corruption as it starts to paralyze the state’s development.” She acknowledged that she had not expected corruption of that huge a scale existed in the country. The president feels disappointed that people are so used to small corruption that the population just tolerates it.

All major political analysts and Prime Minister Kubilius’ advisors scrambled to defuse the assertion, announcing that President Grybauskaite had gone too far. “Problems, due to wide-spread corruption, do exist. However, the situation is not as dramatic as Grybauskaite puts it,” Virgis Valentinavicius, a representative for Kubilius, emphasized. According to him, the government constantly encounters attempts of various interest groups to influence the decision-making, but he stresses that the president’s harsh words should be seen as an incitement to fight the corruption.

The president’s assertion is “very populistic,” says political scientist Algis Krupavicius. “It is very strange to hear these kinds of words from her lips, as she is in a position to change the situation. If an opposition representative spoke like that, it would be Ok. However, it is very strange to hear that from Grybauskaite. We can admit that Lithuania deals with many social and economic problems, as well that the developing democracy has not brought what the society had expected. Nevertheless, the president and all politicians’ duty is to tell what and how to do things so that the oligarch-and-contrabandist-governed state situation would reverse to a better condition,” Krupavicius maintained.

Lauras Bielinis, Adamkus’ former advisor, calls Grybauskaite’s harsh rhetoric “an attempt to cover up Adamkus’ criticism.” Speaking to The Baltic Times, he adds that “I am convinced that if Adamkus had not spoken out, we would not have heard the harsh statements by Grybauskaite. Those who know how communication methods work and who have been involved in them, see that Grybauskaite, instead of matter-of-factly responding to her predecessor’s criticism, opts to feverishly counterattack, unscrupulously picking up words, simply slagging off the man that she should keep her ears open to.”

Asked who – Adamkus or Grybauskaite – is right with the assessments concerning the policies towards Belarus, Bielinis answered, “Whether it is a catastrophe or not, we will judge by the aftermath we see in a few years. However, we are already catastrophically lagging behind what we achieved just a couple of years ago. Thus, with the outer calmness and friendly mutual assessments, our relationships with Poland, regardless of the changes at its top, have been seriously cracked. Besides, when it comes to our relationships with either Ukraine or Georgia, the intensity has been on an obvious decline. From the standpoint of maximum benefit internationally, even the recent Grybauskaite visit to Minsk and meeting Lukashenko was not of any use for us, while the Belarusian dictator and his communication team have considerably [benefitted] from the visit. I have no doubt that the visit should have happened well before or, depending on the political circumstances, after the election in Belarus. Obviously, it was a major blunder. Grybauskaite will do whatever it takes to stifle the criticism, even to blast a statesman of the kind that Adamkus is,” Bielinis said.