COMMENTARY: Union treaty spells end to Belarusian statehood (02/13/00)

COMMENTARY

Union treaty spells end to Belarusian statehood

The commentary below is reprinted from the winter 1999-2000 issue of the Belarusian Review, published by the Belurusan-American Association Inc. It appeared in the "Editor's Desk" column; the editor of the quarterly publication is Joe Price.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus declared its independence. Since that time, Western governmental, educational and research institutions have become increasingly interested in the newly independent republic. Now, after three years of plotting by Belarusian President Alyaksander Lukashenka and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Belarus has come full circle and returned to the bosom of Russia. At the end of 1999, the treaty merging Belarus with Russia went into effect. It provides for long-term integration, yet promises to preserve the independence and sovereignty of both states.

One nagging question remains: Given her long history of brutal conquest of neighbors and backflipping on international agreements, can Russia really be trusted to respect the commitment to Belarus' independence? This is, after all, the country responsible for the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that led to World War II, and the country now engaged in a violent struggle to maintain power in Chechnya.

In 1994, the United States and Great Britain joined Russia as co-signers of the Budapest Memorandum of the Organization for Security and Coopration in Europe (OSCE). This document stated that the "United States of America, the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland reaffirm their commitment to the Republic of Belarus, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of the Republic of Belarus."

So much for words, however eloquent. Soon after the signing, Presidents Lukashenka and Yeltsin conspired to absorb Belarus into the Russian Federation in such a way as not to alarm the West and inadvertently cut the purse strings of aid that emanated from there. Their efforts were not unsuccessful. On December 8, 1999, Presidents Yeltsin and Lukashenka signed the Union Treaty of Belarus and Russia.

The treaty was ratified in short order by the Russian Duma (December 13), by Lukashenka's rubber-stamp lower house (December 14) and by the upper houses of both parliaments (December 22). Votes in favor of ratification were unanimous in both countries' chambers - and no debates or hearings proved necessary.

The West greeted the news with a yawn. Indeed, were it not for Mr. Yeltsin's illness - which ostensibly delayed the signing of the union treaty - the world would probably not even have noticed that, in the space of two weeks, an entire country of 10 million had vanished off the map of Europe, once more firmly nestled in the clutches of the Russian bear.

How, then, should freedom-loving Belarusians now respond? What support can they reasonably count on from the world community in general and Western democracies in particular?

Alas, in our opinion, the West will continue to pay lip service to issues regarding Belarusian sovereignty; its primary concern is hardly Belarus' survival. The West is concerned first and foremost with protecting its financial investment in Russia, and ensuring that Moscow does not rattle its nuclear weapons. The attention of Washington, for example, is also focused elsewhere - specifically on the Middle East, where it expends huge amounts of time, energy and money just to keep the Israelis and Arabs from killing each other.

With Mr. Yeltsin now gone and acting President Vladimir Putin in power, the rules of the "union game" may also suddenly change. Mr. Lukashenka used to exploit Mr. Yeltsin's feelings of guilt over his role in the break-up of the Soviet Union; the renewed union was a mechanism through which the Russian president could atone for his sins. The pragmatic Mr. Putin, of course, bears no such guilt, and such maneuvering on Mr. Lukashenka's part will no longer be effective.

Indeed, on January 2, Mr. Putin made clear his intent to play hard ball with other former Soviet republics. The new president is far more likely to look at the bottom line with respect to Belarus and seek the most advantageous solution for Russia. He will probably shuck the whole idea of a union of two sovereign states and push for the full integration of Belarus as a province of Russia, thereby reducing the size of Russian subsidies to Belarus.

This, of course, means that the most President Lukashenka can hope for in terms of personal power is to become the governor of such a province; given such a scenario, all his alleged aspirations for the Kremlin throne will be hopelessly dashed.

It would have been much cheaper and much easier for the West to have prevented the merger in the first place; undoing it now will doubtless prove costly, both in political and financial terms. It is unfortunate, for instance, that briefings were discontinued in 1997 between members of the Belarusian diaspora in the United States and State Department representatives. Valuable information heretofore imparted to the State Department's ambassador-at-large on developments in Belarus was discontinued following changes in the ambassador-at-large position.

Unless the Russia-Belarus union self-destructs in the way the Soviet Union did, the process of regaining independence for Belarus will no doubt be very long and arduous. Hopefully, it can be accomplished peacefully, as Belarusians are a peace-loving nation.

As things stand now, the new union has yet to be christened with a name. Gorbachev, perhaps only coincidentally, suggested a moniker whose acronym has a curiously familiar ring: "Union of Socialist Sovereign Republics."

Is the world ready for the new USSR?

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