WHITE GOD IN MINSK

WHITE GOD IN MINSK When I was checking out of my hotel in Minsk earlier this month (March -96), one of the cleaning women approached me with an obsequious steel-toothed smile.

"You're leaving already?" she asked me.
"Yeah, I'm sorry to go," I answered.
"That's too bad," she replied. "I wanted to introduce you to one of my daughters. I brought pictures of them to show you the other day, but then I saw you come here with someone, and... Well, the oldest one is twenty-eight. Maybe... she's too old for you? She has a young boy. I also have an eighteen-year-old daughter. I can introduce you to either one. Which would you prefer?"
"They both sound nice."

She was persistent about pimping one of her daughters off on me. She wouldn't let me go. After all, I was a White God, and these days in Minsk, White Gods are few and far between. She showed me a pair of black and white neo-Soviet passport photos of her daughters: Sveta, the 28-year-old, and Anna, the 18-year-old. H'm. This was going to be a tough choice. Should I take door number one-fresh, nubile, easily-impressed; or door number two-divorced, mother... Damn, this was a real brain teaser...

So how did Minsk get this way? How did I wind up with this steel helmet and sword, wading onto shore of some wheel-less Indian settlement, way out here in Eastern Europe?

Even though Minsk is actually a clean, attractive, quiet, friendly city -a jewel by provincial Russian standards- it is almost totally devoid of foreigners. Ever since Lukashenko came to power, greedy, young, underqualified Western "entrepreneurs" saw their gold-plated lollypops snatched from their hands. So they split town, realizing that their chances of participating in the economic rape of Belarus was next to nil: Lukashenko had basically cancelled "privatization" and "foreign aid," meaning, for folks like us expats, that Belarus has nothing to offer. By eschewing a Western-rape-friendly policy, Belarus has also earned a bad rap from the Western press.

There's a lot of good going on in Belarus that never gets reported. For example, did you know that Belarus posted a 2.6 percent gain in GDP last year, and a massive 11 percent gain in the first half of this year -all achieved in total defiance of World Bank and IMF advice? Of course not -reporting that kind of good news about Belarus, or the fact that Lukashenko's approval rating among the population would make any world leader drool with envy, might confuse our sense of good and bad, right and wrong. So he's a "tyrant", and Belarus is an "economic basket case."

Consider this recent editorial, "Russia and Its Tyrant Neighbor," from that ultimate paper of record, the New York Times: "Belarus's economy, which looks the same as it did 10 years ago, is so feeble that it makes Russia's economy look robust." Well, there's some truth to this: ten years ago, the economies of both countries were about double the size of what they are today-meaning if Belarus's economy looks like it did ten years ago (and indeed it is getting there faster than its "booming" neighbor Russia), it is the envy of nearly all of the FSU. Belarus doesn't have wage arrears problems and miners' wives laying down on railroad tracks like Russia. In fact, Russia only paid off its arrears by changing the terms of its gas supply agreements, squeezing Belarus for a huge sum of cash (at the advice of anti-Belorussian Western advisors). Even so, Belarus continues to grow.

If Lukashenko could run in a free and fair Russian election, he could possibly win -which means Chubais' friends would lose everything. That's why the "Russian liberals" -the English- speaking thieves, one of whom owns ORT, the other who owns NTV-despise him. For them to support Lukashenko would be as mad as Al Capone supporting J. Edgar Hoover. (On a minor point, the opposition press IS alive in Belarus. The Minsk News, the only English-language newspaper in Belarus, is rabidly anti-Lukashenko -in comparison, the Moscow Times reads as though Chubais himself edits it. Imya, the popular Minsk weekly, not only savages Lukashenko with words, but always prints a brutal, hilarious exxile-esque full page picture of the president in highly unflattering poses.)

We only know the bad because Lukashenko doesn't play our game, and because he doesn't suck up to the most gullible PR conduit in the world -- the Western press. Compared to last year's press darling, Alexander Lebed, Lukashenko is a puppy. Lebed's people once boasted that intellectuals -- the press, that is -- are the easiest people to snow over with a few good soundbites. He also boasted that killing 30,000 people was a reasonable figure to bring order to Russia. And yet the press loved him. Lukashenko, on the other hand, tosses a few people in jail, and the way it's reported in the press, you'd think that the gas chambers were running at 110 percent. Even a longtime Minsk-based EBRD employee, after bemoaning Lukashenko's economic policies, admitted to me that the only difference between Belarus and Ukraine -- which is the world's third largest recipient of Western aid -- is purely rhetorical. "Ukraine at least talks the talk," he quipped, "but neither of them walk the walk [of market reforms]."

Grim portrayals mean people are loathe to even visit, much less invest, in Belarus. Indeed, almost everyone asked me, before I left for Minsk, if I wasn't worried about getting arrested. Not at all -if anything, I'd happily offer my services as a kind of Goebbels to the Lukashenko regime, should they ever need a counter-propagandist. The way I see it, thanks to Lukashenko's badboy rhetoric, the cleaning woman offered me her two daughters. So he's all right by me. And this is the point I want to get across here. If a poll were held today, I would be one of the 55 percent of Belorussians who recently gave their leader a thumbs-up of approval, and not one of the nine percent of Russians that gave Yeltsin -the hero of the West- a similar approval. Why? Because frankly, I like being a White God. It feels good walking down the street and having people throw themselves at your feet. I had no fewer than three marriage proposals, including one from a "virgin". It was hilarious and gratifying and I never expect to experience that again in Europe, barring some kind of war.

Men dream of being White Gods because, more than anything, it is sexually appealing. For women, it's a bit different. Women generally aren't turned on by desperate male losers the way men get excited by desperate girls. But this doesn't mean that the White God Factor doesn't appeal to women as well -only for them, it's usually a sentimental thing. Women too like being in a position of strength- in this case, to "help the needy."

When I was in Vang Vieng, Laos, this one German Greens type complained to me that the White God Factor was already receding. "It's not so good in Laos anymore," she said with a hint of frustration. "The people aren't as poor as they used to be. Four or five years ago it was better." She didn't even realize how evil that was -wishing that the locals were more poor, only in order to satisfy her sentimental desire to be "needed" and "helpful." Whatever -the point is, it's almost ALWAYS good for us when others suffer and we don't.

So thank you Mr. Lukashenko for saying the wrong things in the wrong way to the wrong people. And a big thank you to you, every other Western news media/organization/businessmen, for spreading cheap Cold War lies about an alleged tyrant and his allegedly basket-case nation. And oh yes, to you as well, all the aggrieved bankers, IFIs (international finance institutions) and human rights activists for helping to scare all the White People away from Belarus. All of you helped make my five days in Minsk among the most memorable of my life.