Region: Belarusian authorities crack down

Re-elected Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko called opposition protests "banditry" at a press conference just one day after armed police officers used stun grenades and truncheons to break up a rally in Minsk Dec. 19.

"There will be no revolution in Belarus," Lukashenko said.

A second rash of arrests followed up the protest Dec. 20. According to the Belarusian daily Telegraf, seven of the nine alternative presidential candidates have been arrested. Journalist Natalia Radzina, editor of the independent Charter 97.org, was beaten unconscious by police, The Guardian reported. Police detained hundreds of demonstrators - 639 by Lukashenko's count - who marched through the capital before congregating in front of Parliament. Some protesters attempted to break into the seat of government before security forces broke up the crowd.

At least 10,000 protesters gathered Dec. 19 on the capital's Independence Square to oppose the victory of incumbent Lukashenko in elections earlier in the day, with opposition leaders claiming the numbers were closer to 50,000. According to preliminary results, Lukashenko, who has led the former Soviet republic for the past 16 years and was once referred to as "Europe's last dictator" by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, received nearly 80 percent of the vote.

"You should read our laws to find out what's going to happen to protesters; everything will be done according to the law," Lukashenko told Russia's state-run Rossiya- 24 television channel. "You won't see any disturbances."

One of the detained opposition presidential candidates is Vladimir Neklyayev, a poet, who was beaten unconscious en route to the rally and eventually hospitalized with head injuries. Hours later, unknown men kidnapped him from his hospital bed, and he has yet to return to the public eye. Lukashenko called the events "a provocation."

He later went on to accuse Neklyayev and another hospitalized opposition candidate, Vitaly Rymashevsky, of hiding from security agents.

"They wanted to sit it out in the hospital," Lukashenko told the Russian news agency Interfax. "They still wanted to become president. What president squeals to the world after being punched in the face? You must suffer."

Western leaders reacted sharply to the outbreak of violence.

"We are particularly concerned about the excessive use of force by the authorities, including the beating and detention of several presidential candidates, and violence against journalists and civil society," a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Minsk said.

Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament, said, "This incident sheds the worst possible light on the presidential elections."

The Kremlin was more tight-lipped in its response, with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev calling the events an "internal matter."

Opposition paralyzed

While Western election observers said the vote itself did not meet international standards, they called it a marked improvement on the 2006 vote with opposition candidates gaining some access to mass media outlets.

"[The] events do not reflect the relative progress we had noted so far in the pre-election period," said European Union Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton.

Still, Tony Lloyd of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe told The Financial Times that "the counting process lacked transparency."

Opposition parties comprise less than 1 percent of the members on local election commissions that tally votes. While condemnation of the violence emanated from various corners, the security forces' operations seemed to have succeeded in ending any public dissent.

"The opposition has been paralyzed," Joerg Forbring, a senior program officer at the German Marshall Fund told the Bloomberg newswire. "It will be very difficult for the protests to continue...The police detained not only the presidential candidates, but also the campaigners and organizers."

In recent years, the EU has sought to broaden ties with Belarus. In 2008, a travel ban on senior government officials was suspended, and later the isolated East European nation was welcomed into the Eastern Partnership program - which was launched in Prague during the Czech EU presidency in the spring of 2009. It is unclear how the events will affect future cooperation.

"We have to keep the door open," Elmar Brok, an MEP from Germany for Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, told The Moscow Times.

Lukashenko is slated to be inaugurated to a fourth term Feb. 18.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com