Bat'ka knows best
 
If there is one generalization about Belarus that is true, it is the pivotal role played by Lukashenka. In a region where even strong presidents and prime ministers share or delegate power, the man known to many as Batka – or “ Daddy” – rules his country like a tyrannical patriarch.
First elected in 1994, Lukashenka extended his term and dissolved parliament in a 1996 referendum that most independent observers deemed unfair, later issuing a decree on “unemployment” that compelled ousted parliamentarians to clean streets and perform other menial duties. He deepened the rift with the west by driving out a number of diplomats who he accused of plotting against him, making it clear at the time that Belarusian agents had been bugging their embassies. In 2000 he further entrenched his power by engineering the election of a parliament that remains unrecognized by most western governments. (Another referendum during this period (1996) approved the continuing use of Soviet iconography as official state symbols, which helped solidify the country’s reputation as a Communist Disneyland.)
The run-up to this year’s presidential contest has been even more poisonous, with American officials backing up claims by defectors that Lukashenka had been using an elite commando unit to murder political opponents and settle personal scores. Six weeks before the first round of voting, scheduled for Sept. 9, a defiant Lukashenka took to the airways, vowing that he would forcefully resist any Yugoslav-style popular uprising should the opposition claim fraud in the polling. “I will win these presidential elections, whether with you, which I would like, or without you, but I will win them,” he said. “And I am afraid of no one.”
With his lantern jaw and trademark mustache and comb-over combo, the hulking former collective farm boss has become an icon of illiberalism, the last dictator in Europe following the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. He hires, fires and disciplines local and state officials as he sees fit, and bypasses his rubber-stamp parliament with flurries of decrees and edicts. Even within the all-powerful Presidential Administration there are only a handful of individuals – perhaps a half-dozen – who have some influence over Lukashenka, chief among them the heads of the militia and the KGB. (The Administration’s Economic Department, for example, is largely considered impotent.) Lukashenka is, by most accounts, a “loner” who nevertheless expects and demands total loyalty and obedience from all who work for him.
And thanks to his efforts to block the dismantling of the state command system, almost the entire country works for him. Alan Greenspan has more influence over the world economy, and may occasionally step in to orchestrate the bailout of a particular firm or sector. But in Belarus , nothing is done without the active or passive involvement of Lukashenka, from the broad outlines of fiscal and monetary policy to the investment decisions facing small private enterprises.
“Any foreign investment over $10,000 must be approved by the Presidential Administration – that is, by Lukashenka himself,” says Jaroslav Romanchuk, vice-chairman of the United Civil Party, and one of the country’s most vocal free-marketeers.