29 March 2024, Friday, 18:50
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Dictatorship Is Boring

Dictatorship Is Boring
Iryna Khalip

What did Lukashenka's phrase about his "own understanding" of human rights remind us of?

Of course, this is it: "I'm not like that!" I believe that before the meeting with the EU Human Rights Representative Stavros Lambrinidis, Aliaksandr Lukashenka also spent plenty of time in front of the mirror, trying on all sorts of earrings, brooches, buckles and saying, I'm not like everyone else! I am more handsome and intelligent, and let everyone notice it and say: no, he's not, he has his own understanding of human rights and the country's special path.

Lukashenka thinks it is cool -- to not be like boring Europeans. What kind of life is it, when at twenty you can plan everything until the old age, like saving money for a trip round the world after retirement? Getting a mortgage for the house and paying it for twenty years, knowing exactly how much you will pay this month, in five years' time, and in ten years' time, regardless of the oil price. Choosing the furniture for the nursery even before the wedding. Finding the right school for the children, when they are still very small. Booking tickets for the next year, when the holiday is not yet finished. Knowing where you will be buried and what your grandchildren will sing on your grave. How boring it is to live in Europe! No adrenaline.

Living in Eurasia is totally different. An entrepreneur wakes up in the morning not knowing if he will be able to earn enough money for the present for his wife's birthday -- or will there be another decree, which will deprive him of the opportunity to work. A young mother orders clothes for her children over the Internet, because it is cheaper and she does not know, if she will get her a parcel at the post office, or will she be told that it is "no longer possible and forbidden since the previous day." Or a pensioner coming to the store and not knowing what he or she can buy for pension this month and what it will become the next one. A teacher comes to school and does not know if he or she will be able to conduct the lesson or they will be ordered to take the children to some hockey tournament named after Kolya Lukashenka to make up the crowd. An opposition activist Maksim Vinyarski leaves the house and does not know, if he will go as far as the bus stop or will be grabbed at the entrance, arrested and brought to court or police station.

I'm not even talking about people who go to the protest rallies and do not know if they will be put in jail for 15 days or 15 years and those who are waiting for the verdict and do not know, if they will be shot or left alive.

But Lukashenka is seriously mistaken if he thinks that such life is very interesting and he is unusual, extraordinary, not like others and cannot be confused with others. It is not true. Former Soviet dictators who now call themselves the Eurasian leaders (they think it sounds nice which is really silly) – they all look the same. They are all dull and incompetent like the Soviet Politburo members in the portraits. When those portraits were nailed in every little Soviet institution, you could play the game "find 10 differences," knowing that you would lose. It was impossible to find differences in these sad faces. Even the degree of degradation was almost the same.

The same thing is happening now. All these "Eurasians" are the same. And Lukashenka is exactly the same as Nazarbayev, who jailed the dissident Atabek for 18 years for taking part in protests against the demolition of houses. Lukashenka is the same as Putin, who publicly, in front of the whole world, is killing Nadiya Savchenko. Lukashenka is the same as Rakhmon, who filed an international warrant for a girl who wrote a Facebook post and ordered to kidnap in Moscow and secretly deliver to Dushanbe Maksud Ibragimov to accuse him of calling for the overthrow of the constitutional order and jail him 17 years of in strict regime prison. Lukashenka is the same as the Aliyev-junior, who first brought to disability and then jailed for seven and a half years the journalist Khadija Ismailova, before that enjoying the torture of human rights activists Leyla and Arif Yunusov.

All of them are similar like peas, gray and indistinct, like dust on the pavement, but for some reason each of them is convinced of his original identity and a special way of its dictatorship. Moreover, they believe that people find it interesting to live in such a phantasmagoric reality. (My colleagues must remember conversations with high-ranking officials who said "what are you, reporters, going to do in democracy? What will you write about? You should be grateful to us for the topics!")

In fact, there is nothing interesting in the dictatorship. It is awfully boring. And always the same -- in Europe, in Asia, or in Africa. But to live in a country with a predictable standard of European democracy, with a precise knowledge of peoples' rights, with the understanding of the significance of one's own voice in the election is in fact interesting. To vote, engage in volunteering, require a report from the deputy of the district, to protest, to study, to travel, to plan lives, to make money is interesting. And simply to survive is boring. Lukashenka, like all his fellow Asiopean friends is absolutely boring, no matter how much he is grimacing in front of a mirror, in front of European visitors and before television cameras. Dictatorships have no special ways. There is only one way. And we know it.

Iryna Khalip, specially for charter97.org

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