OSCE: elections in Belarus ‘severely flawed"
Although their re-elected President Alexander Lukashenko had
imposed a
ban on such protests, thousands of Belorussians turned out defiantly to
demonstrate on Sunday evening in their capital, Minsk.According to the official election result, Mr Lukashenko won by a large majority, taking 82.6 percent of the votes, but opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich spoke of widespread fraud and has demanded new elections.
Fear
Compared with the mass demonstrations of recent years in places such as Georgia and Ukraine, the attendance at Sunday's protest in Belarus was poor. In those other countries, weeks of demonstrations eventually led to democratic revolutions. In the case of Belarus, however, people's fear of demonstrating is much greater, while support for radical change appears to be much smaller.
According to journalists who were at the demonstration in Minsk, the protest was mainly a way of venting anger and a call for freedom. The demonstrators regard Mr Lukashenko as a dictator who, after already spending 12 years as president, will now continue to rule with an iron hand for another five years thanks to a change in the constitution and electoral fraud.
Police interference
The police didn't intervene to break up Sunday's protest in Minsk, something which they did do on a large scale in the weeks that preceded the election, when more than 450 members of the opposition were detained. Just last week, a whole batch of tents was seized at the border - they were intended for use during prolonged protests by those opposed to the president.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) issued its initial assessment of the election on Monday, commenting that they were 'severely flawed due to arbitrary use of state power and restrictions on basic rights.'
Sanctions
Even before the vote took place, the OSCE expressed criticism of the arrest of one of the two opposition candidates. European Union Commissioner for Foreign Relations Benita Ferrero Waldner also threatened before the election with the possibility that the existing sanctions against Belarus could be widened, an issue which was scheduled for discussion at Monday's meeting of the EU's foreign ministers.
Meanwhile, politicians in Russia appear to be much less harsh in their judgment of the elections in neighbouring Belarus. Russian election observers indeed described the vote in Belarus as 'fair', while the leader of the observer mission from the Commonwealth of Independent States voiced particular criticism of the OCSE and the Belorussian opposition candidates, saying they had - among other things - committed fraud when collecting signatures to support their campaigns.
Warning from the Kremlin
However, according to Pontis - an NGO based in the Slovak capital, Bratislava - Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly phoned Mr Lukashenko at the weekend to warn him that he must avoid bloodshed. On Monday, a number of liberal papers in Russia also criticised the early publication of the outcome of the election based on exit polls, some two hours after the polling stations opened in Belarus.
While Belarus's state-controlled television did its best to back Mr Lukashenko on election day - broadcasting dozens of interviews with experts and ordinary citizens, all of them with nothing other than praise for the sitting president - he remained fairly silent on the day itself, saying little more than that: "the answer will come from the people of Belarus."
That was on Sunday. It's now a matter of waiting to see what the opposition will do next, and how the Belorussian authorities react.
Margreet Strijbosch
20-03-2006
See also:
Vladimir Putin
Belarus
Belarus - training the opposition
EU welcomes Russian - Ukraine gas accord
Some World News as at 2006-02-26: A new radio station backed by the European Union has started broadcasting to Belarus in an effort to balance the country's state-controlled media.
World news briefs at 4th March 2006: Belarus police beat up journalists ahead of poll. Police in Belarus are reported to have beaten up at least nine journalists
Global gains in Freedom: At the same time, authoritarian leaderships in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, and, most importantly, Russia have adopted policies that will make it more difficult for the development of a genuine civil society and will impede the development of a democratic political opposition.