WHO WILL TAKE A GRENADE LAUNCHER?

At the beginning of November A. Lukashenko announced creating of a territorial defense system in Belarus. According to the plan, it should become something like another army, a partisan movement just like the one that existed in Belarus during the years of World War II. The territorial defense announcement was made at the final stage of the Libyan revolution. The idea was partly motivated by the events in Libya where an insurrection of M. Gaddafi’s opponents was supported by NATO forces.

However, efficiency of such a system of territorial defense depends not only on its financial and organizational support, but also on people’s readiness to participate in it and on their attitude to it. During the course of the December opinion poll we tried to clarify the above mentioned attitude (Table 1).

Table 1. Distribution of answers to the question: “Recently A. Lukashenko announced that “the West is striving for undermining the situation in Belarus in order to include the republic into the sphere of its influence” and that is why it is necessary “to prepare the population so that they could at that very moment when it becomes urgent take a gun, a machinegun or a grenade launcher at the place where they are called up for military service and perform their functions”. Some people support the idea of territorial defense development, others do not. And what is your opinion?”

As it can be seen, people’s support turned out to be rather restrained – only a bit more than a quarter of respondents. The data of Table 2 let us find out what the degree of support depends on, among which strata of the Belarusian population it is higher, and among which it is lower.

Table 2. Relationship of the attitude to the territorial defense to socio-demographic characteristics and political assessments*, %

* The table is read across

Attitude to the authorities exerts the strongest influence on the authorities’ initiative concerning territorial defense: the number of territorial defense adherents exceeds 50% among their supporters proving to be approximately two times larger than the sample average. At the same time, among opponents of the authorities negative attitude towards creating of the “people’s army” turns out to be almost general.

Assessments of the country’s economic climate and demographic characteristics are the factors that follow political preferences according to the influence force. Those who are not satisfied with their financial standing are ready to support the new defense initiative of the authorities to a much lesser extent. On the whole, the youth and middle-aged people estimate it equally negatively; however, even among older people the assessments’ balance is virtually zero. Among the groups with different level of education it is positive only in the group of respondents with primary education. The share of territorial defense opponents grows linearly at passing to the groups with a higher level of education. And those who do not tear their hands away from a computer keyboard are not very much inspired by the idea to replace it by a “partisan” grenade launcher either.

It should be noted that if among the groups with negative attitude to the authorities negative perception of territorial defense is almost general, the share of the undertaking adherents is only a little bit more than 50% even among supporters of the authorities.

It is instructive to compare the data of Table 1 with the answers to a question from an opinion poll held four years ago (Table 3).

Table 3. Distribution of answers to the question: “What do you think of the statement made by A. Lukashenko in the course of the recent press conference for Russian journalists: “If tanks come from there (i.e. from the West) and go to Russia, we will die here for Russia. And our people should be ready for it”?”, %

As it can be seen, the ratio of assessments is rather similar to the ratio of territorial defense assessments. Thus Belarusians are inclined to run about with grenade launchers approximately to the same extent as they are ready to throw themselves under tanks.