Minsk Madness

OK, the post title is really just an allusion to the college basketball tournament currently taking place in the US, known as "March Madness." I don't think there's nearly as much madness in Minsk at the moment as democracy-philes might like. But in my (uneducated) opinion, I don't think it's over yet, either. There is a fledgling tent city (a tent village, maybe?), and people are using the internet and foreign media to get the word out given the media blackout conditions which exist in Belarus.

If you're reading this blog, odds are that you're already familiar with Neeka's Backlog, which is providing much better coverage of what's unfolding in Minsk than I could hope to do. The coverage there is more personal and also more up-to-date than anything you'll see in the mainstream media, because Veronica is watching (among many other things) the LiveJournals of people directly involved in the process and posting translated excerpts on her blog. This means that she finds things like this (a poster encouraging people to "kill your inner Lukashenko", sourced here - with a comment suggesting that the black-and-white version is better for flyering, because "you'll go broke paying for toner" to print the version with a red background).

Other excellent English-language coverage, with good photos and commentary on MSM coverage, is available here, here and here.

It's become a cliche, but only because it's a truism, to remark on the essential role of the internet in giving revolutionaries a fighting chance. Twenty or thirty years ago, the tanks would have rolled, and there would maybe have been outrage in foreign countries (depending on how much information got out), but inside the country no one outside of a select few would have known what happened. Not so today. Long live the internet. Zhyve Belarus.

I am still hoping that (as Veronica mentions in this post) that foreign MSM journalists stick around for the planned weekend opposition rally and as long as there's any semblance of a tent city. It's possible that Bat'ka is just waiting for the Amerikosy and other for'ners to leave before doing something drastic, the power of the internet notwithstanding.

And in the interests of presenting both sides of the story, here's a pravda.ru forum which reprints the Guardian piece by Jonathan Steele, doubtless controversial in certain circles, in which he laments "interven[tion]" by Western governments and the Western media's "narrow and partisan" coverage of the political scene in Belarus.