WikiTargeted
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange preaches openness. But in Belarus, Europe’s last dictator is using once-secret U.S. cables to go after dissidents.
In December 2010, Israel Shamir, a WikiLeaks
content aggregator in Russia, traveled to Belarus with a cache of unredacted American diplomatic cables concerning Belarus. (At the time, these unredacted cables were not available online.) He met Lukashenko’s chief of staff, Vladimir Makei, handed over the documents to the government, and stayed in the country to observe the presidential elections. Lukashenko pronounced himself the winner on Dec. 19, 2010, with nearly 80 percent of the vote. His nearest opponent, the leading dissident Andrei Sannikov, is now serving out a five-year prison sentence and is reportedly being tortured.
The same month that Shamir was in Minsk on behalf of WikiLeaks, the American left-wing journal
Counterpunch published an
article by Shamir in which he extolled Lukashenko (“The president of Belarus … walks freely among his people”), derided the dictator’s opponents (“The pro-Western ‘Gucci’ crowd,” Shamir called them), and credited WikiLeaks with exposing America’s “agents” in Belarus (“WikiLeaks has now revealed how … undeclared cash flows from the U.S. coffers to the Belarus ‘opposition’ ”).
He has a Jewish-sounding name, but Shamir is a dangerous anti-Semite. Will Yakowicz, who interviewed Shamir in Moscow for a Tablet Magazine profile,
concluded that he is an anti-Semitic Holocaust-doubter. An
exhaustive investigation carried out by the Norwegian anti-racist magazine
Monitor found that Shamir has a long history of association with European fascist parties. He has changed his name several times, published anti-Semitic articles, and falsely claimed to be a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz. Shamir was also in the habit of offering himself as a speaker at white-supremacist conventions in return for a small fee, daily expenses, flight tickets, and hotel accommodations for him and his wife. (WikiLeaks has since tried to
distance itself from Shamir, but
recent revelations by a former WikiLeaks staffer suggest that he was an influential part of the organization.)
In January 2011,
Soviet Belarus, a state-run newspaper, began serializing what it claimed to be extracts from the cables gifted to Lukashenko by Shamir. Among the figures “exposed” as recipients of foreign cash were Sannikov, the defeated opposition presidential candidate; Oleg Bebenin, Sannikov’s press secretary, who was found dead in suspicious circumstances months before the elections; and Vladimir Neklyayev, the writer and former president of Belarus PEN, who also ran against Lukashenko and is now under house arrest. Because virtually every opposition leader was already under arrest at the time Shamir leaked the cables, the publication of these documents served to bolster, rather than prompt, the regime’s crackdown in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections.
But the damage inflicted by Shamir’s WikiLeaks cache didn’t end last year. As I learned from Sergey and other opposition figures, the leaked cables have harmed the lower rungs of the opposition movement. Having targeted the leadership of the opposition, Lukashenko is now going after dissident intellectuals. The hope? By the time Sannikov and his colleagues serve out their sentences, their base will have been decimated.
“If I am not arrested tomorrow, we can talk,” Sergey told me from his home in Minsk via Skype. We agreed to meet the next morning at Yakub Kolas Square, named for the famous Belarusian poet, where a protest against the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’ president, was planned for 11 a.m...
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This is why George Orwell made it his final mission to purge Tankies from the UK.