Alexander Lukashenko: Europe’s last dictator
“Perhaps the best encapsulation of Lukashenko’s life might be one that he wrote about himself,” said Business Insider.
“My life, just like the lives of other presidents, is very busy. You wake up and keep running. What does it feel like to be on the run for 25 years? I got used to it,” said a quote from Lukashenko displayed on his official online biography.
“This hamster wheel keeps spinning, and there is no escaping it. If you stop, it will keep moving and throw you back. This is a mode of life. I am used to it,” he added.
He is still legally married to his high school sweetheart, Galina Zhelnerovich, with whom he has two boys, Viktor and Dimitry, although the couple have been estranged since the mid-1990s. He also fathered a son, Nikolai, in 2004 with a woman widely believed to be his personal doctor, Irina Abelskaya.
Back in 2014 when “Kolya”, as Nikolai is known, was just ten, he was already being touted as a future successor. The Independent reported the “next President of Belarus already has plenty of experience of the trappings of high office, having overseen military parades, sat in on Cabinet meetings, and met several world leaders when he accompanies his father, the current president Alexander Lukashenko, on trips abroad”.
‘Europe’s last dictator’
Dubbed “Europe’s last dictator”, Lukashenko has, over his nearly three decades in power, created a cult of personality as the “Batka” – or father – of the Belarusian people and turned his country into a hugely corrupt “mafia state” tightly controlled and monitored by the secret police – still ominously called the KGB, said the BBC.
Setting out his political philosophy in 2003, he said: “An authoritarian style of rule is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. You need to control the country, and the main thing is not to ruin people’s lives.”
The New York Times put it like this in a November 2021 piece: “In a region buffeted by decades of authoritarianism, he has proved one of the most brutally tenacious leaders in the former Soviet Union, a one-man state, abetted by a powerful and menacing security apparatus and by the Kremlin, his sometime ally.”
“Armed with a rough rural accent”, Lukashenko initially styled himself as “a populist folk hero against a corrupt, immoral and bullying elite”, said the newspaper. He “still casts himself as the defender of the underdog” even as his government routinely harasses, jails and even tortures critics, arrests journalists and quashes independent media.
A key turning point came in summer 2020 when nationwide protests erupted after Lukashenko was widely accused of fixing the results of the presidential election. Despite declaring to have won 80% of the vote – giving him a sixth term in office – opposition figures claimed he had in fact lost.
According to Politico, more than 35,000 Belarusians were arrested during the subsequent uprising, with thousands facing abuse and torture in police custody.
In May 2021 Lukashenko sparked an international outcry after he ordered military aircraft to intercept a Ryanair flight travelling from Athens to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. The plane was forced to land in Minsk where one of the passengers, Roman Protasevich, a blogger and activist who had been a fierce critic of the Lukashenko regime, was detained.
“In kidnapping a civilian airliner to silence a political opponent, Lukashenko has effectively taken his terror from the domestic to the international stage,” said Politico at the time.
The move further isolated Belarus from the West, which imposed increasingly restrictive sanctions, and forced the rogue state and its leader to forge an ever-closer alliance with Moscow and the man Lukashenko on Monday called his “elder brother” – Vladimir Putin.
Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/people/958982/alexander-lukashenko-europes-last-dictator