Byelorussia Declares Its Independence

The small Soviet republic of Byelorussia, one of the country’s most conservative, declared its “political and economic independence” on Sunday as the breakup of the Soviet Union gathered momentum amid the political chaos left by last week’s abortive coup d’etat .

Acting a day after the neighboring Ukraine declared its independence, the Byelorussian Parliament voted unanimously--despite its Communist Party majority--to secede from the 73-year-old Soviet nation, whose dissolution now appears certain.

“This means we are leaving the Soviet Union,” Zenon Poznyak, the head of the pro-independence Byelorussian Popular Front, said after the vote.

Moldova’s legislature will vote on a similar resolution Tuesday.

The Supreme Soviet, the country’s national legislature, will be asked when it meets in emergency session today to free those republics--notably the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--wishing to secede to go their own way quickly.

“There is no one today to prevent the national republics from choosing their own road,” Vitaly N. Ignatenko, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s press secretary, said Sunday in an interview on CNN.

The Baltic republics, all free states that were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 under a pact with Nazi Germany, are fast winning international recognition of their independence.

France, Japan, Argentina, Norway and Denmark all said they are ready to recognize the independence declarations of the three republics. And U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said in Washington that he expects the United States to do so shortly.

The process gathered momentum last week as Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, who now sets most of the political agenda here, recognized the independence of Estonia and Latvia, as he had earlier done with Lithuania.

In Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, President Vytautas Landsbergis predicted there will be a “chain reaction” or even “some kind of competition” by Western nations to be among the first to officially recognize the independence of his country and neighboring Estonia and Latvia after 51 years of Soviet rule.

“We are free,” Landsbergis told journalists. “This is a formality only.”

Denmark seemed poised to become the first nation to dispatch an ambassador to the Baltics. Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen said veteran diplomat Otto Borch will travel to Latvia today. He will also be charged with organizing diplomatic representation in Lithuania and Estonia.

Also today, Japan announced its intention to recognize the three republics once Moscow has approved their bid for independence, government spokesman Misoji Sakamoto said.

Argentina today became the first country in the Western Hemisphere to announce its recognition of the Baltic states but has announced no plans for immediately exchanging ambassadors.

Norway has issued a similar announcement.

Iceland was the first to issue such a declaration--last year.

In Byelorussia, local Communists scurried to escape the opprobrium from the failed putsch, as had Ukrainian Communists, by voting with ardent nationalists to pull out of the Soviet Union.

Its Parliament suspended the Communist Party and took control of its buildings and bank accounts. The republic’s Communist president, Nikolai Dementei, resigned after coming under pressure from opposition deputies who accused him of supporting the coup attempt.

There were doubts about the true intentions of the Byelorussians, for the move could be primarily tactical, perhaps an attempt to stabilize the local political situation in the wake of the coup. But its declarations, like that of the Ukraine, the second most populous republic after Russia, will certainly complicate and could easily frustrate Gorbachev’s efforts to reconstitute the country on a different political and constitutional base.

The Union Treaty was to have been signed last Tuesday, and the deep devolution of power it envisioned was a principal factor in the conspiracy to oust Gorbachev in favor of a conservative junta.

The Ukraine and Byelorussia were among the nine republics that had come to terms over the treaty, and thus over the future of the country, in five months of negotiations under Gorbachev, and they had been regarded as integral parts of the new federation envisioned by the treaty.

Their declarations of independence this weekend put into question the viability not only of the treaty’s current draft--Yeltsin has called for its revision, and Gorbachev has agreed--but also of the nation that it envisioned.

With the three Baltic republics already having declared their independence, along with the southern republic of Georgia, and with Moldova on the Romanian border poised to do so, the loss of the Ukraine and Byelorussia would cut from the country a vast amount of territory from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea.

A Redrawn Map of Europe

Headlines of the last year have proclaimed a unified Germany and independent status for the Eastern European states. Now the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are threatening to break away from the Soviet Union. When was the last time Europe looked like this? The pre-World War II map drawn from the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.

Pre-World War II

* The victors of World War I redrew the map. The three Baltic states, which had been ruled by Russia’s czar, were independent from 1918 to 1940.

* What had been the Russian Empire before World War I was now the Soviet Union.

* Germany was a unified country.

* An independent Poland also was separated from Russia.

* The Austro-Hungarian Empire became Austria, Hungary, Romania and the two new multi-ethnic states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Today

* 46 years after the Soviets reclaimed their land, the three Baltic nation states now are moving toward independence.

* The Soviet Union is facing division from ethnic republics that raise questions about its unity.

* After its longtime split, Germany is once again unified.

* Poland, until last year a Soviet East Bloc nation, is once again independent, if smaller.

* The internal ethnic differences within Yugoslavia threaten its unified status.