[A-List] Lithuania: New & Improved 'Salami tactics'

["Anne Williamson" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

Sanders Research Associates

"Salami tactics"
All News is Lies

31st May 2004

John Laughland

Democracy is a word, like Holocaust, which has instant resonance. But what
does it mean? It is obvious that all states in the world mediate their "rule
by the people" with (a) representative institutions and (b) other bodies,
especially judicial ones, whose role is precisely to prevent the simple
dictatorship of the majority. So democracy does not simply mean rule by the
people, which is in any case not realised anywhere. Instead, the word
signifies a bundle of concepts which are themselves both vague and sometimes
contradict one another, including "the rule of law".

It is this latter concept, "the rule of law", which has been used
increasingly over the last decade and a half in Eastern Europe to supplant
the directly democratic elements of most states. Respect for "human rights"
and the values of "civil society" have been relentlessly invoked to promote
one single political model based on cosmopolitanism, the so-called free
market economy, secularism, and integration into (i.e. control by) various
international structures like the EU and NATO. The dismantling of state
power over the economy, and the increasing importance of supranational
control, have been complemented by the internal dispersal of state power
through regionalism and an increased role for non-governmental (and
therefore unaccountable) institutions.

The result of these incremental steps is that, in the name of the rule of
law and the respect of certain values, power is increasingly removed from
the hands of elected officials and, as such, democracy is weakened.
Culturally, too, rule by the people is regarded with increasing suspicion.
Despite the constant invocations of democracy, the truth is that any
politician who is genuinely popular is, as a consequence, usually regarded
with considerable suspicion by the new world order. As I have been able to
observe on many occasions, popular politicians are frequently attacked as
"populist", the clear implication being that the people's wishes are
dangerous if they are not severely mediated by the political elite. The
reason for this is easy to understand: a politician who is popular is
difficult to control, because he is not dependent f or his political
survival, as so many politicians are, on the support of a party apparatus,
or (even more commonly) on foreign governments, for his political survival.

These general principles are ones I have deduced from observing European
politics for a decade. They are regularly confirmed anew. They provide a
good way of understanding what democracy is not. The most recent
confirmation came on 6th April, when the president of Lithuania, Rolandas
Paksas, was removed from office by the national parliament, having been
directly elected by universal suffrage in December 2002. Not only did Paksas
' impeachment, which was subsequently confirmed by the country's
constitutional court, flout the basic principle that the people should be
allowed to choose their leaders; it also flouted several of the most
fundamental principles of law itself. Worse, his impeachment has attracted
almost no comment in the international press, and no cr iticism from other
member states of the EU and NATO who are usually so keen to tell other
countries how to behave. It is now possible for democracy to be closed down
in an EU and NATO member state without anyone noticing. The Lithuanian
example is therefore nothing but the culmination of a long war of attrition
waged against democracy, and may now provide a model for other European
states.

The story began in December 2002, when Paksas 48, was elected president in a
surprise victory against  incumbent, Valdas Adamkus. Although he had been
prime minister twice, Paksas had always been a political outsider. He did
not come from the charmed circle of politicians who have governed Lithuania
for the last 14 years, having been an air force pilot before going into
politics. Adamkus, by contrast, was an elderly American citizen who had
spent most of his adult life in Chicago. Having fled his native Lithuania in
1944 with Hitler's retreating army, with whom he fought against the Soviets,
Adamkus was brought back as president in 1997, accompanied by a team
composed largely of his fellow Americans. I well remember visiting his
campaign offices dur ing the 2002 elections, and finding that many of his
party workers were from the USA. Adamkus, 77, had stood next to George Bush
when the American president visited Lithuania shortly after its accession to
NATO in November 2002, and perhaps the Americans were cross to see their man
booted out and replaced by someone who barely spoke English.

For even the rather passive Lithuanians resented being governed by a bunch
of foreigners. Other things also rankled with the electorate. As a condition
for joining the European Union, Lithuania is required to close down its
nuclear power station at Ignalina. Many Lithuanians, reduced to abject
poverty by a decade of vicious shock therapy, which has seen most of the
country's industry and all of its agriculture destroyed, were opposed to the
idea that this last vestige of the country's infrastructure should be
dismantled. Paksas, however, said he would rescind the agreement to close
the plant if elected.

As prime minister, Paksas had shown similar political instincts. Energy
politics again came into play in 1997 when he resigned suddenly from office
in protest to a deal signed with an American company, Williams, for the
purchase of an oil refinery. The deal was unpopular because the contract
signed by his predecessor required the Lithuanian state to pick up the costs
of restoring the refinery, so that Williams could make money out of it. This
was a classic example, identified by Noam Chomsky, of the way in which
market reform often means socialising losses and privatising profits.

For the first nine months of Paksas' presidency, things went fairly
smoothly. He presided over the referendum on the country's accession to the
EU-as he reminded me when I met him last week in Vilnius. He had done
everything the West wanted. But in October 2003, the secret services of
Lithuania communicated information to the President of the Parliament
concerning the alleged Mafia contacts of one of Paksas' advisers. The
adviser was sacked on the spot. Following this, it was similarly revealed
that Paksas had given a Lithuanian passport to a man, Yuri Borisov, who was
also a Russian citizen (although he had lived in Lithuania since the age of
6). It was alleged that Borisov had Mafia connections, never specified, and
that he was a Russian agent, poised to entangle Lithuania back into the arms
of a renascent Moscow-based sphere of influence.

It was for these "gross violations of the constitution" that Paksas was to
be impeached six months later, on 6th April 2004. The campaign against
Paksas was a clear example of the power of political demonisation. Guilt by
association is, by any chalk, a tenuous charge. In Paksas' case, it was made
even more absurd because Borisov himself had never been convicted of any
crime. Nor was he particularly rich. The allegation that Paksas was guilty
of favouritism by rewarding a donor to his election campaign with a
Lithuanian passport, and that he was therefore a president who could be
bribed, was also ridiculous: as everyone in the country knows Lithuanian
passports are easily available for a $3,000 bribe to a local official. Had
Borisov really wanted such a reward for his donation of several hundred
thousand dollars to the Paksas campaign , it would have been a pretty
round-about way to spend his money. Instead, it is possible that Borisov
wanted to become a presidential adviser. But Paksas never offered him a
post.

Moreover, the precise allegation against Paksas was actually not that he had
given Borisov a Lithuanian passport (he has the right to award citizenship
by decree, and his predecessor had given out 3,000 passports in this way)
but instead that Borisov had retained his Russian nationality. The
Lithuanian constitution forbids double nationality. In other words, what
Paksas' enemies called "gross violations" of the constitution was in fact a
minor administrative error which could easily have been corrected without
removing the president from office.

Furthermore, the allegation that Paksas was in danger of bringing Lithuania
back into the Russian orbit was an enormous canard. To understand why is to
understand just how dysfunctional post-communist societies like Lithuania
are. First, although Paksas was accused of favouritism to a man who was
allegedly a Russia agent, Russia did not lift a finger to prevent Paksas'
impeachment. (In any case, prosecutors have never charged Borisov with
anything.) Second, the present prime minister of Lithuania, Algirdas
Brazauskas-one of Paksas' enemies, a man lauded in the West as a great
democrat, and who also served as president of the Republic before Adamkus-is
himself a lifelong Communist and servant of the Soviet state. Under
Communism, Brazaus kas rose to the most powerful position in the Communist
hierarchy of the country, becoming First Secretary of the Soviet Socialist
Republic of Lithuania in the 1980s. It is obvious that if a man like
Brazauskas has been able to remain in control of Lithuania for twenty years,
serving first the Russians and now the Europeans and the Americans, then the
hysterical attacks against Paksas for allegedly being in the pay of a
Russian agent were totally bogus.

Of course, the affair had nothing at all to do with Borisov's stupid
passport. Instead, inasmuch as it was about any motives other than the sheer
spite felt by a cosy elite against an outsider, the affair reveals the true
locus of power in Lithuania and other post-communist states. It became
evident during my recent visit to Vilnius that the privatisation process is
controlled entirely by the secret services. Privatisations are considered to
be state secrets, and anyone who reveals the details of them-for instance
the different amounts bid by potential buyers-can be subject to criminal
prosecution. As Los and Zybertowicz put it so well in their seminal book on
Poland, Privatising the Police State, the key fact in post-communist
societies is that the control of information was the key to money and power.
In Lithuania, all stages of the privatisation process are handled by the
secret services. It is obvious that the secret services still control the
politics and economics of this EU and NATO member state.

While in Vilnius, I met a man who is facing criminal prosecution for
betraying a state secret because he had transmitted to President Paksas
information which suggested that a big privatisation was being handled
corruptly. A factory making alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks had two
potential buyers, an Italian company and a group of Lithuanian "businessmen"
. The Italians had offered 90 million litas and the Lithuanians 40 million,
but they got the deal. Now the whistleblower is facing criminal prosecution.
When I met Paksas and asked him what else he knew about this deal, he said
he could not tell me for fear of facing even more criminal prosecutions. By
the same token, one of the crimes of which Paksas was accused was betraying
a state secret. As president he had told Borisov that his phone was being
tapped. It is obvious that he, as presi dent, was merely an ornament sitting
on the top of a state structure which is, in reality, controlled by spooks.

As if this were all not enough, the illegal way in which the impeachment was
conducted is an outrage. Paksas found himself attacked for alleged criminal
links but without specific allegations which would have enabled him to
defend himself. During the procedures in the parliament which led to his
eventual impeachment, his lawyers were denied any chance of defending him,
because the parliamentarians simply said that all the facts of the case had
already been established by the constitutional court. So a man who had been
democratically elected by universal suffrage in December 2002 was summarily
removed from office by a simple parliamentary vote, after no evidence had
been presented, and in the absence of anything resembling a proper trial.

Worse was to come. When the politicians who had removed Paksas realised that
he was likely to stand for election again, and that he would probably win,
an "ethics committee" in the Lithuanian parliament initially stated that he
should not be allowed to stand as a candidate. But the Central Electoral
Committee, for some reason, accepted his candidacy. Then the parliament
rushed through an amendment to the electoral law for the presidential
elections, saying that an impeached former president could not stand for
re-election.

This law fundamentally violates the principle that legislation should never
be retroactive. The existing constitution and the electoral law had made no
such provision. It did not even say that candidates for the president could
not have a criminal record. Paksas therefore appealed to the constitutional
court which ruled on 25th May. In one of the most Orwellian reasonings to
come out of a court since the Moscow show trials, the Constitutional Court
found that the amendment to the electoral law was indeed
unconstitutional-because it did not go far enough. The court ruled that an
impeached former president- i.e. Paksas -can never hold any public office
again for the rest of his life. The review of the law thus led to a
worsening, on review, of the penalties which had been retrospectively
imposed on Paksas. It was rather like Louis XIV w ho reviewed a ten year
prison sentence passed on his Finance Minster Fouquet, by commuting his
sentence to life in solitary confinement.

Apart from ex-president Paksas, I also met one of his chief accusers.
Raimondas Sukys is deputy chairman of the parliament's committee on legal
affairs and leader of the prosecution against Paksas. While listening to
him, I realised that I was watching in real time a process of which I had
previously only read about in books. After the Red Army took over Central
and Eastern Europe in 1945, it took several years for the democratic
political life of those countries to be completely closed down. This was
achieved by a process of "salami tactics", which meant that democracy was
sliced off bit by bit. This is what is happening now. Sukys is one of the
most sinister people I have ever met, and my rage was only compounded by the
sense that he would cynically and impassively employ whatever arguments were
necessary to ensure that the Mafia an d the spooks retain control of the
Lithuanian state. But he said one thing which was particularly arresting:
that the impeachment process in Lithuania was a novelty in Europe. The
implication was clear: as Lithuania is now an EU and NATO member state, the
principle that a cabal of politicians and judges can remove a democratically
elected leader has now been established, and the Lithuanian closure of
democracy may serve as a precedent for the whole of Europe.