Russian President Vladimir Putin cut an uncharacteristically helpless figure last Saturday as the waxen mask of invincibility slipped, even if just for a while, but maybe forever. Can Humpty Dumpty ever be the same again, and what of those like SA that deified him as the guardian of the portal to a brave new world?
Putin was presumably cursing his latest-model Huawei cellphone as he failed repeatedly to raise Wagner mercenary force leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. And for a while the world was on a knife-edge as Prigozhin, the former hot-dog seller who became a billionaire caterer to kings and presidents, rampaged towards Moscow, cursing and shooting down helicopters while advancing unhindered on the Kremlin.
When in doubt, dial a friend and Putin did. So take a bow, Alexander Lukashenko, leader of the great, unfree nation of Belarus, a Russian vassal state. He accepted Putin’s call and became the unlikely saviour and guarantor of the quest for the new world order we’re all meant to be looking forward to, but probably not as much as international relations minister Naledi Pandor is.
On Saturday before midday, a phone rang in Minsk, capital of Belarus, an entirely landlocked country famous for tennis stars and trees. Shaded by what remains of the medieval forests of Europe, Belarus admits as little sunshine as it does social and political change. Much like the ANC, the logic of the fall of the Soviet Union and the reasons for its demise have largely passed it by.
Belarus is almost unchanged politically since the days of the upheaval of Mikhail Gorbachev. Apart from Russia, it shares borders with Nato-member countries and Ukraine, yet it holds out against the democracy wave that has reshaped eastern Europe over the past 35 years.
There, life has continued much as it has for decades, the state dominating the economy and Lukashenko its politics. He came to power just two months after Nelson Mandela became president in May 1994 and has stayed ever since. He wins rigged elections with an 80% majority and wages a brutal campaign against opposition politicians, NGOs and free media.
Sufficiently hostile to “Western-inspired” domestic opposition, he is a perfect fit for the “multipolar world” in which tyrants like himself are freed up to contest (no, vanquish) the reputed hegemony of the US. Such a world, in a future that the war in Ukraine is meant to serve as a bridge to reach, passes no judgment. It would accept the credentials of a Lukashenko as readily as it would those of a prime minister of New Zealand, for example. Sovereignty, dude!
Shaded by what remains of the medieval forests of Europe, Belarus admits as little sunshine as it does social and political change. Much like the ANC, the logic of the fall of the Soviet Union and the reasons for its demise have largely passed it by.
Quite untypically for a leader averse to a free media, Lukashenko proved an undiscovered talent as a storyteller, relating in a level of detail, no doubt embarrassing to Putin, how he had saved the day during the few hours that shook the Kremlin. It could have gone either way.
“Look, Sasha, it’s useless, he won’t even pick up the phone and doesn’t want to speak to anyone,” Lukashenko reported a dejected Putin moaning to him last weekend. He was referring to Putin’s efforts to contact his old mate Prigozhin, who was busy holding what he would later call a “protest” against Putin’s military leaders.
In a country where protest is illegal, only the boldest of civic engagements will get the authorities’ attention. In this case, moving a motorised division on the M4 to Moscow and downing helicopters on the way. No overturning full rubbish bins for these rebels.
Lukashenko continued: “I said to Putin: ‘We could waste him, no problem. If not on the first try, then on the second. I told him: don’t do this.
“Give me his number,” he went on. “[Putin] said, ‘most probably, the FSB [Russian Federal Security Service] have his number.’’’
In the hours that followed, Lukashenko leaned on Prigozhin to end his “protest” and agree to “move to Belarus”.
“You’ll just be crushed like a bug,” Lukashenko said he had told Prigozhin.
Later, Putin told senior officers the treason charges would be dropped. The mercenaries could also “go to Belarus”, and those who didn’t could sign contracts with the Russian military. Belarus is already building a camp for the rest.
In a country where protest is illegal, only the boldest of civic engagements will get the authorities’ attention. In this case, moving a motorised division on the M4 to Moscow and downing helicopters on the way. No overturning full rubbish bins for these rebels.
All of which events must be unsettling for those who had pinned high hopes on Putin in partnership with China’s Xi Jinping to awaken the world to the delights of a brave new era post-Pax Americana.
In snuggling up to these aggrieved giants of the East, the ANC’s worldview fosters a hostile and vengeful interpretation of history. It does the country no good but rather serves an agenda dominated by the pursuit of the mirage of historical justice, backed by a demand for restitution that roots our policies and outlook in the past rather than in the present. It greatly enriches elites.
Russia and China fortify their supposedly hegemonic struggle with the US and Europe with appeals to former colonies, playing to elites’ luxury concerns and imagined grudges but short-changing the common people because such a stance repels investors and new technology, mostly from the West. And it weakens our bargaining power, with China especially, as we again become exporters of minerals and importers of cheap finished goods in a perpetuation of colonial trade patterns. Are we squeezing the best possible terms for SA in our trade deals with countries with which we feel ideological affinity or is it all about mutual political gratification? And what of opening their markets to our own manufactured exports?
For a while we in SA had seemed eager to forgo the investment and trade links offered by our historical partners in the West, tempted by the romance of a sentimental wave of revolutionary nihilism, with the mythical figures of an omnipotent Putin (and Xi) as overlords and underwriters. Look mom, no dollars!
We’ve given them too much credit. Putin’s political frailty has exposed the risk of basing an entire global project on an individual and his personal agenda — and the myopia of those like our government who, perhaps until recently at least, accepted his tyranny and his illegal war without qualification.
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