A short period of rehabilitation and refreshment after the violent March 25 is gradually coming to the end, as the Belarusian opposition is preparing for its next major street rally – a traditional Chernobyl March scheduled for April 26. The success or failure of this action will show whether the society has revived from fear. Anatol Labedzka said on RFE\RL that, if numbers would amount to dozens of thousands, the protest could be considered efficacious.
According to Milinkevich’s website, BNF Party jointly with VoliaMusic are releasing a musical disk “Chernobyl Winds.” The CD will be distributed via subscription. You can suggest your own title for the disk. Your contacts (e-mail, phone number, address) should be sent to czarnobyl2006@tut.by. The most active participants will be the first to receive the disk.
And the youth wing of BNF is preparing a booklet about Chernobyl disaster.

While Belarusian opposition supporters utter their dissatisfaction with mild sanctions against Lukashenka, the Washington Post has stepped even further and accused EU leadership of double standards for dictators:

Even as Europe’s policymakers were stoking their outrage over Belarus’s tyrant, they were quietly preparing to approve a trade agreement with Central Asia’s Turkmenistan — home to Saparmurad Niyazov, or Turkmenbashi the Great, a ruler whose absolute power, cult of personality and repression of his people make Mr. Lukashenko look, well, Small.

Had Belarus possessed any valuable natural resources, maybe our leader would’ve been excused and welcomed in Brussels. I don’t know. But with all due respect, the current sanctions do not offer any leverage to democratization of Belarus. They look as a symbolic gesture, and not a real response.
On the other hand, this question is always difficult – what should be done? As far as I can see, consultations continue and the discourse Belarus is still open.

I’ve just re-watched “Schindler’s List.” What a movie! It is definitely on my personal list of the top 5 best films ever made. It seems to me that one of the most baffling features of any dictatorship is immorality of those scoundrels who serve the ruler.
What kind of person should one be to take part in those mass murders? How on earth could a human being serve in Auschwitz, operating the gas chambers? What could justify his or her actions?
Of course, there is no sense in comparing Lukashenka to Hitler. Luckily, the president of Belarus is much milder. And even if he had ordered something really atrocious, I doubt that the army would have obeyed. But still, following the events of March, pondering over the violent dispersal of the rallies, I’m curious what made those young soldiers, riot policemen, KGB agents overreact, overdo their tasks? Well, I don’t think there was an order from somebody to brandish a gun in front of Siucyk’s forehead and tell him he would be executed. I can’t buy it there was an order to beat up all the arrestees in the buses, throw them on the floor, humiliate them, etc.
But even those who acted on the orders – how could one justify actions of judges who sentenced hundreds to detention, conducted trials like a joke without even a semblance of legality? How could one justify a learned professor flunking a student for his or her political stand? How could one forgive an official overseeing the major electoral fraud, bridling local opposition activists, and doing whatever “the center” orders? Is there any decency in these people?
Dictatorship is all about a test of each and every one of us – are we humans? Or are we just beasts, pets serving the Ubermensch that feeds us? Are we thinking just about today or do we envision ourselves in 10-30 years? Won’t we feel sorry for our actions if we behave like scum?
Now a bit about the sanctions from the EU. Yes, it is like a bad joke – 31 persons on the blacklist, while thousands of foreigners (according to some sources, more than 40 thousands) are not allowed to enter Belarus. Of course, it is hard to check the lists the EU officials must have received from the opposition. The lists must contain all the executors of the orders, maybe the enjoyers of their might, maybe just fearful creatures afraid to lose their jobs and keep on serving the dictator. It is also more than probable that the KGB has some discrediting information on every more or less significant official in the country and all it has to do is pull the strings. But anyway, these must be the people who violated the law and because of them Belarus is the European outsider for so many years. Lukashenka is still in power primarily because of them – the timorous, menial elites, the fawning officialdom. Corny as it gets, but if Belarus ever becomes a democracy, these people should undergo the process of lustration.
And they should make no mistake that they are invincible. As a left-wing satirist, Lolik Uskin, wrote in Nasa Niva, the mild sanctions of the EU came as a real surprise to those people who expected but were not included on the blacklist.