Reuters
A CONFUSED NATION DECIDES ITS FUTURE
By Lena Craig
Filed: Friday, 17 Nov 2000 22:36:15 +0200
Minsk, Autonomous Republic of Belarus
Driving into Minsk from the Polish city of Bialystok on European Highway 498, the first thing that you notice is the forest.
Bialystok and most of the rest of northeastern Poland is the Kresy, the poor hinterland of one of the leading states of the European Confederation.
The Second World War brought about the genocide of the Jews who once made up two-thirds of Bialystok's population; the Third World War made Bialystok's old trade with Russia collapse irretrievably. The average family income in Bialystok is only 65% of the Polish national average, and is 55% of the average of the pre-1985 member-states of the European Confederation. Each year for the past decade, Bialystok and its hinterland has been designated by the Polish government as a special development zone.
And yet, as you drive across the Belarusian frontier, you're reminded that Bialystok is positively bustling next to Belarus. There are more than a million people living in Bialystok province; in Belarus' province of Hrodna, a territory about twice the size, there are only 110 thousand people. As you drive down the well-maintained highway, everywhere that you look you see the great deciduous forest that covers almost two-thirds of the land area of Belarus. Part of the forest stems back thousands of years to the last Ice Age; the Bialowieza Forest, on the Polish-Belarusian frontier, was an international nature park even in the Soviet era. Most of it, though, was planted after Belarus joined the Confederation as a Russian autonomous republic, in order to try to restore something approaching a natural ecology on this long-suffering land. Even as you drive into Minsk, the capital of Belarus and home to more than half of Belarus' population of 550 thousand people, you're reminded that this city is an empty city.
Welcome to Belarus, the smallest and perhaps the most unlikely of the successor states to emerge from the post-1985 Russian federation [...]
[...] In the Third World War, Belarus was bombed along with the rest of the Slav-populated areas of the Russian republic. Though the Belarusians, in fact, constituted a distinct people, with a separate history stretching back in time eight or nine centuries, this was not enough for Belarus' then 11 million inhabitants to be spared [...]
[...] The 1990 European census recorded 650 thousand people living in Belarus, while estimates made this year before the Russian War suggest that barely more than a half-million people still live inside Belarus. This small population would make an independent Belarus one of the smallest countries in Europe by population, ahead only of Montenegro. The population of Luxembourg, at 600 thousand, is barely larger, but the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is one of the richest countries in Europe. Belarus would easily qualify as Europe's poorest country . Although there is near-universal literacy and Confederation subsidies have managed to maintain the Belarusian technical and health infrastructures, remarkably little is actually produced here -- GDP per capita is estimated to be 11 000 écus, as poor as West Africa. However, from 1990 to 2000 the West African GDP per capita grew by 41%, while Belarusian GDP per capita didn't grow at all [...] Opponents of Belarusian independence ask how such a poor country can possibly afford independence. [...]
[...] For Aleksandr Lukashenko, leader of the Belarusian Popular Alliance, an independent Belarus is the only way to maintain Belarusian culture.
"There are three million people born in Belarus, or whose ancestors were born in Belarus," he said in a recent television interview on Réseau Voltaire. "Three times as many Belarusians live in Poland as live right here, and they aren't coming back. Two times as many Belarusians live in Ukraine as in Belarus. As many again live in South America. And hardly any of them are interested in being Belarusian."
"An independent Belarus inside Europe is the only place that we can save our language and our culture. There are three East Slavic peoples -- ourselves, the Russians, and the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians have their own independent state, and they have a bright future ahead of them. Russians have three states of their own, and offworld allies. And Belarus? We don't have anything. Without a country of our own, there will be no more Belarusians."
European census data suggest, though, that Belarusian culture may be dying already. The 1996 5%-sample census suggested that only 80% of the population of Belarus understood Belarusian, while 90% understood Russian and 30% understood Polish. Barely half of the Belarusian population speaks the Belarusian language at home, while the east of Belarus has been mostly russified and the Polish language is beginning to make inroads among the Eastern Catholics of Hrodna province. James Livesay, in a Euronet-published article (FOLLOW LINK), argued that the Belarusian language may already be in the terminal stages of decline, and that there might simply be too few speakers of Belarusian to keep the language alive. Perhaps, if instead of being annexed into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic after the end of the Soviet Civil War, Belarus had become an Associated Soviet Socialist Republic along with Ukraine, the Belarusian language might have survived to the present day [...]
Tatarstan, Komi, and Kalmykia, by contrast, are all examples of Russian ethnic republics that have kept their cultures alive, even thriving. The Tatar, Komi, and Kalmyk languages are all thriving, traditional religions and customs are still practiced, and if anything, the trend over the past two decades has been for the assimilation of ethnic Russians living on their territories into the majority populations, not vice versa [...]
[...] In the end, Belarus may have no choice, despite its poverty and its failing identity, but to become independent. The people of Belarus are uniformly anti-Tsarist and hate the new Russian Empire forming along the spine of the Urals; likewise, they don't see themselves as having anything in common with the Slavic Alliance in central Russia. Ideally, Belarusians would prefer to remain part of the Russian Federation, but it appears that the Russian federation might be reduced to a union of the Leningrad and Northern republics alone, or just Leningrad; needless to say, such a union would not be viable. The idea of union with Poland, or with Ukraine, or even with Lithuania has been mooted, but none of those countries has shown any interest.
Belarus may just have to go it alone in the decades and generations to come.