Perilous
Times
The Pope's unholy alliance with the dictator
Alexander Lukashenko, still president of Belarus thanks to a
rigged election, has found an ally in the Vatican
o Nick Cohen
o The Observer, Sunday 16 January 2011
Scandal is too mild a term to describe the abuse of children at
the hands Roman Catholic priests. But whatever word you fix on –
"atrocity", "obscenity", I can't find the right one – you cannot
doubt that rape was all about power, as the feminists of the 1970s
once said. The power of the old to groom and force themselves on
the young was complemented by the power of the Vatican to protect
rapists from justice and cover up their crimes.
If the church believed its own doctrine, one might have expected
the papacy to show a smidgen of contrition and to seek repentance.
After presiding as Cardinal Ratzinger over a parallel justice
system in which there was one law for his church and another for
everyone else, however, Pope Benedict XVI is showing that he will
forgive his own sins but learn nothing from them.
It is not too hyperbolic to say that the dictatorship of Alexander
Lukashenko is raping Belarus. From the moment crowds gathered in
Minsk to protest about last month's rigged elections, secret
policemen have been forcing themselves on their victims. They have
arrested and assaulted hundreds, jailed seven of the nine
opposition candidates for the presidency and beaten unconscious
one of them, Vladimir Neklyayev, as they dragged him from a
hospital where he might have found sanctuary.
In a tribute to the tactics of the communists, Lukashenko is
threatening to send the children of dissidents to orphanages – his
own form of child abuse. After the authorities tried to pick up
Danil Sannikov, the three-year-old son of the jailed opposition
leader Andrei Sannikov, a local political analyst explained that
"by using children they are able to get their opponents to
confess, to capitulate politically, to appear on state television
and make a repentant speech".
Or as the boy's grandmother put it as she clung to the child: "The
terrible Stalinist times are returning to Belarus. I can't believe
that this is really happening."
Naturally, those members of the Belarussian opposition still at
liberty have appealed for outsiders to condemn the regime. It is
their last card. Russia keeps the tyranny economically secure
because Putin wants Belarus as a buffer state and no more cares
about the sufferings of its people than China cares about the
sufferings of the people of North Korea.
Europe is all they have, and although it is easy to criticise
Baroness Ashton, the British politician hardly anyone in Britain
had heard of until a game of musical chairs in Brussels ended with
her in the seat of the European Union's High Representative for
Foreign Affairs, I have to say that she is behaving honourably.
She met the Sannikov family and promised to do what she could to
secure the release of political prisoners. Her office hints
strongly to me that she will try to persuade European governments
to impose travel bans on Lukashenko and his goons at the end of
month.
The opposition has its enemies in Europe. The correspondent for
the New Statesman, which excused the mass murders of the Soviet
Union in the 1930s, out-Stalinised his Stalinist predecessors when
he cited as a reason for readers to give the dictatorship the
benefit of the doubt his visit to "one of the country's industrial
gems – the enormous Belarussian Autoworks (BelAZ) factory… [It]
employs 12,000 people and is the biggest producer of mining dump
trucks in the world". Beyond the tyrannophile left with its
perennial reverence for truck production quotas, however, the
dissidents' main problem is the indifference of Europe rather than
its enmity.
So it was with a little hope that opposition leaders asked to meet
Archbishop Martin Vidovic, the papal nuncio in Belarus. They
carried a letter to the Pope, which said: "Today Belarus is
enshrouded in darkness. Arrests of activists, raids and pogroms at
independent websites and newspaper offices, searches of apartments
continue. The authorities are blackmailing the political prisoners
using their little children. We are seeking your help." The nuncio
refused to meet them. Later he relented, but Ratzinger has not
protested against the oppression or promised to break diplomatic
relations with the outlaw state.
The Vatican that still claims to be a force for good is staying
silent because it is seeking a concordat with a state that still
has a KGB and statues of Lenin on its streets, just as it sought
accommodation with Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
The advantages for the papacy are hard to judge, because the terms
of concordats are secret, but we can assume it wants what it has
always wanted: public money and control of children's schooling.
The advantages for Lukashenko are easier to grasp.
It is an error to suppose that dictators do not need to worry
about public opinion. At a minimum, they want to secure the
passive acquiescence of the subject population and to demoralise
their opponents. In return for agreeing to cut a deal with Rome, a
grateful Lukashenko has heard Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the
Vatican secretary of state, do both.
The absurd cardinal praised Belarus for allowing "freedom of
religion", and denounced sanctions against the regime as
"unacceptable". Belarus has a large Catholic minority and the Pope
has cold-bloodedly sought to legitimise the dictator in its eyes,
not just with his political interventions, but also by inviting
Lukashenko to an audience at the Vatican.
Last year, I met Natalia Koliada, founder of the Belarus Free
Theatre, a centre of intellectual dissent to Lukashenko. She was
fizzing then; filled with the hope that maybe life in her country
was about to get better. Last week when I phoned her, the formerly
dynamic woman was too depressed to talk.
While it was in London, the Free Theatre showed a video of
Numbers, a brilliant absurdist play which you can find on the
Index on Censorship website . The actors mime surreal routines
while a camera projects on to a wall behind them statistics that
enumerate the scale of prostitution, poverty and sickness in
Belarus. At the end, a list of famous names fills the screen –
Marc Chagall, Isaac Asimov, Kirk Douglas… people we would or
should know about, who had been born in Belarus or into exiled
families.
For a moment, I was puzzled and then realised that the actors were
trying to say that Belarus was a part of the western world and we
should fight for it. The spectacle of the Pope, Europe's last
absolute ruler, cutting deals with Lukashenko, Europe's last
dictator, shows that the fight must also be fought on the home
front.