March 3, 2006	Friday	Safar 2, 1427

MINSK: Nikolai Statkievich shares the foul stench of his tiny cell with five other prisoners. After their 6am wake-up call, the men form a line along the corridor outside, their backs to the wall. As the commandant calls out their surnames, each man answers with his first and middle name and steps forward two paces until his nose touches the wall on the opposite side of the corridor.

Statkievich has to start his forced labour by 8am. This gives him the next hour to drop by his 75-year-old father’s flat for a shower, breakfast and to change out of his prison clothes. Then Statkievich, 49, a former lieutenant-colonel in the Soviet army — who has the equivalent of a PhD in science — reports for duty at a local shop.

He spends his days fixing kettles, irons and radios, and is paid around £35 a month for it. His crime, under article 232 of the criminal code, is: “The organization of mass events that concern disobedience of the authorities and interference with public transportation.” This means he organized a demonstration and it briefly stopped the traffic. For this he was sentenced to three years of forced labour in June last year.

Statkievich’s story reads like a footnote to the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel-prize-winning chronicler of the Soviet ‘gulag’ prison camps of the 1950s. His punishment is known as khimiya (chemistry); it was, he tells me during his lunch break, created “in Khrushchev’s times, when the gulag was dismantled, because there was no one to do the dirty jobs, like work in chemical factories”.

But Statkievich is no 50s dissident. He is one of the last political prisoners in 21st-century Europe, an internal exile in the authoritarian — and often forgotten — state of Belarus. Here, the Soviet Union never really went away.

Baranavichy, population 400,000 — the town that Statkievich is not allowed to leave — is only 150km from Poland, the latest part of the old Soviet bloc to join the European Union. But life here seems worlds apart from the democratic West. On October 18, 2004, Statkievich led a protest against a referendum held over plans to change the Belarusian constitution so that President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since July 1994, had a right to a third term. The poll’s positive result was as predictable as the raft of allegations of fraud and illegality that followed from the West. Statkievich’s protest, obviously, failed to overturn the results and so for this he got three years of khimiya.

Belarus’s 10 million people live sandwiched between the Baltics and the Ukraine, with their former imperialist master, Russia, to the east, and have learned not to expect too much from history, or from their masters. For centuries Belarus was a bargaining chip between European empires. It first existed as an independent state in 1918, only to be swallowed up by the USSR a year later. Stalin’s purges in the 1930s led to at least 100,000 of its citizens being executed and thousands more sent to labour camps. The Nazi occupation and the Second World War led to the death of three million Belarusians — a third of its population, a higher proportion of losses during that time than any other country. The survivors were purged again by a victorious Stalin.

Belarus was then to bear the brunt of the Soviet empire’s ungracious collapse: a fifth of its farmland was rendered unusable by radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Lukashenko, 51, has played on the country’s troubled history. He frequently extols the ‘stability’ that his regime has created. In 2003, he told Belarusian radio: “An authoritarian ruling style is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. Why? We could spend hours talking about this. You need to control the country and the main thing is not to ruin people’s lives.” In a fortnight’s time, after months of careful preparation and repression, Lukashenko, the man the Bush White House has dubbed ‘Europe’s last dictator’, will stage a third presidential election, in an attempt to extend his rule to a total of 15 years, making him Europe’s longest-serving head of state.

After the political upheaval and privatizations of the turbulent 90s, Russia enjoys an improved standard of living. Belarus has seen no such changes: 80 per cent of the economy is still controlled by the state, and the state is Lukashenko.

“He’s a former collective farm manager, still running the collective farm,” says a senior western diplomat, who asks not to be named.

The opposition has pledged to hold massive demonstrations at 8pm on March 19, election day. They say the election has been fixed in advance and hope that by taking to the streets they will spark a repeat of the protest-led regime changes that swept neighbouring Ukraine in November 2004. Their hopes have been bolstered by expressions of support from both America and the European Union, but Moscow — desperate not to see another part of the former Soviet Union turn irrevocably to the West — is backing Lukashenko. The lines are drawn for yet another showdown between East and West.

Meanwhile, fears as to the insidious nature of foreign rock music have led to a law that means 75 per cent of music on radio stations must be Belarusian. All models that appear in advertisements inside Belarus are, according to a new law, supposed to be Belarusian citizens.

When I try to watch the first televised speech of Alexander Milinkevich, the main opponent to Lukashenko in the presidential vote, in a popular restaurant in the centre of Minsk, two young women next to me tell me it is spoiling their conversation. Eighteen minutes into the 30-minute speech, the manager appears and asks me to turn it off. Despite my arguing that the speech is on state-run television, so cannot really be the ‘political agitation’ he suggests it is, he insists I hand him the remote control.

“In his heart, maybe he wanted to watch me,” Milinkevich later tells me, in the back of his campaign minibus. “But business is so tightly controlled here that he might have feared losing money. Self-censorship is the strongest weapon.”

For the most part excluded from the media, Milinkevich has resorted to travelling Belarus in a white minivan with his wife Inna and a few of his 20-strong campaign staff by his side. The day we meet, he is driving three hours to a campaign meeting in the eastern town of Orsha, where about 100 supporters and a handful of police await him in the snow. He has little choice but to campaign at a grassroots level.

There are areas of Minsk where dissent is thriving. A queue is forming on a Tuesday night outside the city Orange Club — named after the colour of Ukraine’s revolution. Owner Pavel Kashirin lets people in one by one, checking their surnames off on a list. Inside, young people drink, smoke and, quite probably, if they are sure no one is listening in, talk revolution. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service

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