Belarus election ‘a farce’, opposition leader tells crowd
The main Belarusian opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, tonight called for new presidential elections as thousands of his supporters jammed a main square in central Minsk to protest the ballot that authorities said would hand incumbent Alexander Lukashenko a huge victory.
The head of the central election commission, Lidiya Yermoshina, said Lukashenko had won 89% of the vote, according to returns from nearly one-fifth of polling districts.
A landslide victory would hand a third term to the authoritarian leader, who has ruled the ex-Soviet republic since 1994.
Milinkevich called on his supporters to return to a central Minsk square tomorrow to continue their protest – signalling the opposition would try to hold a sustained protest of the sort that brought down long-lived regimes in former Soviet republics, including Ukraine and Georgia.
“We demand new, honest elections,” Milinkevich told the crowd. “This was a complete farce.”
A crowd of thousands had gathered at Oktyabrskaya Square to protest the vote and rallied for about three hours before demonstrators moved toward another square to place flowers at a monument.
There were fears of violent confrontation as Milinkevich had called on supporters to come to the square to protest the vote, whose official results he said he will not accept. The government had warned that election-day gatherings would not be allowed.
The crowd was the biggest the opposition had mustered in years, reaching at least 10,000, before it started thinning out.
Despite the government ban on protests, there was no immediate move by police to disperse the crowd. While police closely guarded the building facing the square and temporarily housing the election commission, they did not surround protesters.
“These elections will be recognised neither by us nor by democratic countries,” Milinkevich told an earlier news conference.
Lukashenko has vowed to prevent the kind of mass rallies that helped bring opposition leaders to power in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan following disputed elections, raising the threat of a forceful government response.
The use or threat of force neutralised opposition efforts to protest vote results in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan last year, and a bloody government crackdown in Uzbekistan left hundreds dead.
Earlier, Milinkevich vowed that the demonstration would be peaceful.
“We will come out with flowers,” he said after casting his ballot. “We do not intend to elect a president on the square. We will tell people the truth.”
The state has mounted a campaign of threats and allegations of violent, foreign-backed overthrow plots that its opponents say is aimed at frightening people off the streets and justifying the potential use of force against protesters.
Western countries have forged close ties with the opposition and made no secret of their contempt for the ruler of what Washington calls an outpost of tyranny in Europe. It condemned the campaign as “seriously flawed and tainted.”
While Russia’s relations with Belarus are sometimes strained, the Kremlin is wary of losing its only ally between its western border and NATO countries, and has signalled approval of a Lukashenko victory.
Lukashenko dismissed international criticism. “We in Belarus are conducting the election for ourselves,” he said. “As for sweeping accusations, I’ve been hearing them for 10 years. I’ve already gotten used to them.”
A dictator to his critics, many Belarusians see the 51-year-old former collective farm manager as having brought stability after the uncertainty that followed the 1991 Soviet collapse.
Even independent opinion polls suggested Lukashenko, who has pushed through a referendum scrapping term limits and hinted he plans to stay in office indefinitely, would win a majority and avoid a runoff.
Later central election commission secretary Nikolai Lozovik said Lukashenko had won 88.5% of the vote, compared to 3.8% for Milinkevich, according to a count of 22.3% of ballots. Some 92.6% of voters turned out, the commission said.
