[PEN-L:32453] protection rents, part 3

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Prague racket

Nato is now a device to exert control and extract cash. Those who resist,
like Belarus, are punished

John Laughland
Friday November 22, 2002
The Guardian

At the Nato summit in Prague this week, one man is notable by his absence.
Last Friday, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus was refused a visa on
instructions from Washington, an unprecedented diplomatic snub. After a
six-year propaganda campaign waged against Lukashenko by the west, he now
stands isolated. The EU is about to slap a travel ban on him and his
ministers, like the one imposed against the Zimbabwean government.
Meanwhile, some American politicians have started to refer to Belarus as
part of the axis of evil.

The reasons given for the west's hostility towards Belarus are that
Lukashenko is authoritarian and a "dictator". This is an odd charge, given
that the losing candidates in last September's presidential elections
conceded that the incumbent president had won more votes than them. It is
also strange for the west to revile Lukashenko when it courts so assiduously
President Putin, whose own election, like all those in Russia since 1991,
was outrageously rigged.

Most of the charges levelled against Belarus are absurd. It is often claimed
that people are beaten for speaking Belarusian; in fact it is the official
state language and Lukashenko himself speaks it frequently. It is also
alleged that Catholics and Jews are persecuted there. But the Catholic
hierarchy was restored under Lukashenko and the Oxford Institute for Hebrew
and Jewish Studies has just confirmed that the Jewish community in Belarus
is flourishing. It is also stated repeatedly, without evidence, that
Lukashenko has had his political opponents murdered: these claims persist in
spite of the fact that one of his alleged victims was discovered alive and
well and living in London.

The real reason why the west hates Lukashenko has nothing to do with concern
for democracy or human rights. It is instead that, as a genuinely popular
politician who has preserved his country from the worst ravages which
economic reform has inflicted on its neighbours, Lukashenko is not given to
taking orders. In this respect, he is unlike any of the other senior former
communist officials currently hobnobbing in Prague. The west's friends in
eastern Europe today have their hands firmly on the commanding heights of
political control in their countries, just as in many cases they personally
did under communist dictatorship.

The west prefers such people because the demands it makes on post-communist
countries are so unpopular. All eastern European states are required to sell
off their national economic assets to foreigners, and close down their
agriculture by accepting the dumping of subsidised EU food imports. This
creates massive social disruption and unemployment. In addition, they must
spend at least 2% of their GDP on defence, preferably on arms made in the
US.

Consequently, a small country like Lithuania, whose economy has collapsed so
catastrophically, has just announced the purchase of $34m worth of Stinger
missiles, made by the Raytheon Corporation of Tucson, Arizona. When Tanzania
announced it was spending $40m on a new civilian air traffic control system,
there was an outcry; but Lithuania, whose official GDP is not much larger
than Tanzania's, will have to spend $240m on arms every year as the price
for Nato membership. And Lithuania is just one of seven new member states,
all of which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on arms.

The economic interests driving Nato expansion are so blatant that the man
who co-ordinates US policy on the matter practically has
"military-industrial complex" as his middle name. Bruce Jackson, president
of the US committee on Nato, is a former military intelligence officer in
the US army who became vice-president of Lockheed Martin, the gigantic US
arms manufacturer and biggest provider of financial control and accounting
services to the Pentagon, from whose accounts trillions of dollars have
disappeared.

Jackson left Lockheed Martin in August to take up his new full-time
political job of "promoting democracy in a united Europe". But a good
illustration of the economic agenda which is really behind Nato expansion
was given when Jackson recently told Bulgaria that its membership of Nato
would depend on it selling the national tobacco factory to the "right"
foreign buyer.

Far from promoting democracy in eastern Europe, Washington is promoting a
system of political and military control not unlike that once practised by
the Soviet Union. Unlike that empire, which collapsed because the centre was
weaker than the periphery, the new Nato is both a mechanism for extracting
Danegeld from new member states for the benefit of the US arms industry, and
also - ever since the promulgation of Nato's New Strategic Concept in April
1999 - an instrument for getting others to protect US interests around the
world, including the supply of primary resources such as oil. It is, in
short, a racket. Any state which refuses to play ball knows the
consequences: the humiliating treatment meted out to President Lukashenko is
simply intended pour encourager les autres.

· John Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group

jlaughland@xxxxxxx