DATE:
January 1, 2006
By Yuras Karmanau
ASSOCIATED PRESS
MINSK, Belarus - When the main opposition coalition chose Alexander Milinkevich as its presidential candidate, it gave him a gift laced with dark humor: a pair of running shoes.
The implication was that with no access to media, he would have to run door-to-door across the country of 10 million people to get his message out.
"The opposition has been left no other way to reach the voters," said Stanislav Shushkevich, Belarus' first post-Soviet leader, now an opposition leader.
Few believe the March 19 election will be free and fair.
Ever since he defeated Shushkevich in 1994, Alexander Lukashenko, whom critics call "Europe's last dictator," has come down hard on political dissent. Five opposition leaders sit in prison; four opponents have vanished.
Lukashenko, re-elected four years ago and running for a third term, has the parliament in his pocket and his government controls state television, radio and newspapers. Independent media have been driven underground.
On the eve of the campaign, parliament passed a law making it a crime to discredit the state - putting a huge question mark over how opposition candidates could get their message out without risking imprisonment.
Still, Lukashenko's opponents are encouraged by the revolutions in other former Soviet republics, which were triggered by uprisings against elections that were judged fraudulent.
"Belarus will be next, after Georgia and Ukraine," Milinkevich told The Associated Press after a coalition of opposition parties chose him in October as their joint presidential candidate.
Six candidates in addition to Lukashenko and Milinkevich have been nominated to run. They include an exiled nationalist leader living in the United States, Zenon Poznyak; former opposition MP Valery Frolov, who initiated a 2004 hunger strike of 17 opposition activists to protest Lukashenko's policies; and another opposition politician, Sergei Skrebets, who is in a Belarusian jail pending an investigation into charges he gave bribes.
Milinkevich, 58, is a physicist who founded Belarus' largest network of regional non-governmental organizations - a deeply political undertaking in Belarus, where the government tries to extend its control over every sphere of society, as in Soviet times. He also worked as campaign manager for an opposition political candidate in 2001and had a brief stint as deputy mayor of his home town, Grodno, in the 1990s.
He got a good sense of what authorities have in store for his campaign when state television ran a bizarre report on the opposition's convention.
It focused on a group of self-declared homosexuals who showed up to profess their love for Milinkevich and demand the legalization of same-sex marriage, an unpopular cause in this conservative society that still has one foot in the Soviet era. The opposition says the group were provocateurs masquerading as gays.
On the eve of the convention, authorities closed the printing house and distribution system of the country's single independent newspaper, People's Will. In response, Milinkevich vowed to create an underground information network.
"Belarusians are deprived of truthful information and cannot make a conscious choice," said Kristina Gubskaya, a 67-year-old newspaper vendor who spread her wares including banned opposition publications on the sidewalk outside a Minsk supermarket.
As she spoke, she looked around nervously, watching for police and saying she had been fined several times, taking a chunk out of her $80 monthly earnings. The best place to sell independent newspapers is around big factories during a shift change, she said.
The opposition movements - liberals and communists, nationalists and Greens - don't have a common strategy. Some leaders advocate peaceful tactics such as lighting candles in windows in solidarity with political prisoners; one underground faction, known as the White Legion, believes force is the only way to overthrow the regime.
Money is another problem. There is virtually no independent business capable of financing an alternative candidate's campaign. The country's KGB, which never went in for a post-Soviet name change or democratic facelift, strictly controls the delivery of any foreign assistance funds.
The opposition has almost no representation in official bodies and cannot monitor elections. International organizations have judged all recent elections fraudulent.
"The only thing that remains for us is massive street protests," said Andrey Klimau, a politician and businessman who is serving a 1?-year sentence of exile in the city of Krupki, 80 miles east of Minsk, as punishment for holding a protest in the center of the capital. As a lawmaker in 1996, Klimau tried to have Lukashenko impeached.
"Lukashenko is scared. And the closer change comes to Belarus, the tougher and more aggressive his actions will be," he said.
Source:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20060101-0954-beleagueredopposition.html
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