I landed in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, last Friday to meet the journalist Aleh Byabenin [Oleg Bebenin] and other civil society activists. On Monday I attended Aleh’s funeral.
One of Belarus’s leading journalists, he had been found hanged in his country home earlier on Friday. His beloved 5 year old son’s hammock was around his neck, hung so low that his feet touched the ground. Andrei Sannikov, of the human rights group Charter 97, the organisation Bebenin co-founded, was one of the first at the scene. He has grave doubts about the coroner’s suicide verdict. “No suicide note was found, and his last SMS to friends showed they planned to go to the cinema.”
Byabenin’s associates suspect foul play and talk through tears about a man who devoted 15 years to fighting President Aleksander Lukashenko’s dictatorship, and was in no mood to quit. In hushed tones everyone fears a return to the period between 1997–99 when activists, business and journalists suddenly “disappeared” without trace.
In the past year, human rights activists have faced continual intimidation from the authorities. On 6 December 2009, Yahen Afnagel, a youth leader, was kidnapped in broad daylight on the streets of Minsk and taken by van to a forest just outside the city. His hands were bound together and a bag placed over his head. He told me he was subjected to a mock execution and that men screamed at him that it would be carried out for real if he continued to question the authorities. In just two months, 6 youth leaders faced mock executions.
All of this is happening, today, on European soil. When the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi visited Minsk last November he told President Lukashenko that his people “love you, which is shown by the elections”.
Never mind that the Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE), of which Italy is a member, declared that the previous presidential election” failed to meet OSCE commitments for democratic elections.”
Realpolitik is the order of the day, and the opening up of markets by the IMF and the World Bank are paying dividends for businessmen and their political cronies in capitals across Europe. Britain is no better. Lukashenko’s government is said to be “in discussions” with Grayling, a PR firm owned by Lord Chadlington, one of David Cameron’s closest allies. Lord Chadlington clearly has few qualms dealing with the dictator of a nation ranked 188 out of 195 countries for press freedom; where every gay club has been shut down, and where Lukashenko has personally approved the turning of Jewish holy sites into multi-storey car parks.
Culturally, too, Western artists are helping to soften the image of Belarus. This month Sting will perform a concert in the Minsk Arena. While Sting performs, the banned Belarus Free Theatre will perform “Discover Love” in an abandoned house on the other side of Minsk, their play about the abduction and disappearance of businessman, democrat, and foe of Lukashenko, Anatoly Krasovski. Unlike the audience at the approved Sting concert, those attending performances of the Belarus Free Theatre are subject to harassment by the KGB.
And while Europe ignores the plight of the Belarussian people, the dictatorship is intensifying its efforts to stifle dissent. The KGB and intelligence forces are developing more subtle ways to target opponents. Opposition figures are accused of being Scientologists or threatened with criminal libel proceedings. Yesterday an anonymous comment on the Charter 97 website read: “We will wipe all of you off the face of the earth. None of your relatives will ever produce the like of you again.” The site’s moderator, Natalia Radzina has recently received emails and text messages that say: “We will rape you,” followed by her address.
The case of Aleh Byabenin should ring alarm bells across Europe. We cannot let Europe’s politicians sleep walk into a cosy accommodation with a tyrant. Belarus is Europe’s shame.
Read about the songs they tried to ban, the musicians stopped from playing live, and the singers who are put on trial, in the bumper SMASHED HITS issue of Index
My song Beng Beng Beng was a simple, light-hearted love song coming from an African man’s perspective. I believe it was banned [in 1999] because there were other very political songs [on the album] that they didn’t want the radio stations to play. So banning Beng Beng Beng was like telling the journalists and radio stations, “Don’t touch this album”.
It was very popular in general, and everybody knew about it, but the radio stations never gave it airplay. I don’t think the lyrics were even offensive; it was less offensive than Let’s Talk about Sex, [by Salt N Pepa], but they played that for a long time on the radio stations. When they banned ‘Beng Beng Beng’ the stations were forced to stop playing anything sexual for a while.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKpTYLQ5K9w
I was becoming too popular, too political, everybody was listening to me. People who didn’t even know about my father [Fela Kuti] were getting to know about me, then getting to know the whole story about my father. So I was getting to be a very big story.
My next album was angrier, more direct. The Shrine, my club in Lagos, was open and we played it live there, where it’s always full — we always have about 2,000 people. And they always try to close the club. The last time they tried there was so much international talk about it that they opened it after a week and a half. Everyone was outraged — and not just in Nigeria. There is more pressure coming from outside than inside. Now the government is trying to be accepted by the international community, they are trying to pretend they’re not corrupt, they pretend that everything is OK. Now, if somebody like me is shouting, “No, that’s wrong!” and they then ban my club, stop my music, then they are wrong, they are lying.
In the summer of 1977 I was 15 years old and wore an old tropical linen jacket I’d bought in a charity shop for a quid. It wasn’t so much off-white as ruinous, and it matched the colour of my shoes — winkle-pickers I’d painted myself using some kind of weird leather paint. Naturally I had to lie on my skinny rump to force my El Greco feet through the eight-inch ankles of my drainpipe jeans. Given all this sartorial mayhem it goes without saying that I absolutely concurred with the Sex Pistol’s front man, Johnny Rotten, when he sang, “God save the queen / The fascist regime”. Admittedly the causal connective ‘it’s’ was lost in all the filth and the fury of his delivery, but we knew what he meant.
Actually, I can barely remember the circumstantial pomp that went into the celebration of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, all I can recall is the Sex Pistols’ treasonable ditty, and the fact that it was banned from being played on the radio. At least I’m certain it was banned from the BBC’s Radio 1. I’m not so sure about the commercial stations, but then Britain in the late 1970s still had the anomalous character of a socialist democracy with a vertiginous class system; an anomaly of which the state broadcaster was a key component.
Actually, being banned by the BBC wasn’t that crushing a piece of censorship; other far more anodyne ditties used to be blanked from the charts, or have their lyrics bleeped out by reason of their mild smuttiness. And of course, like all censorship, ridding the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” from the airwaves only ensured its fizzing presence in the brainwaves of disaffected youth. Malcolm McLaren, the band’s Situationist-inspired manager, got reams of publicity from the banning, together with a special cruise he organised on the day of the Jubilee, during which the band were to blast Parliament with their subversive sounds.
