BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

11/04/2006

E.U. Bars Belarusan President and 30 Others

By Peter Finn

Washington Post Foreign Service

In a statement, E.U. foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg said the banned people were "responsible for the violations of international electoral standards and international human rights law, as well as for the crackdown on civil society and democratic opposition."

Lukashenko won a third term in the March 19 election with nearly 83 percent of the vote, following a campaign in which opposition supporters were harassed and arrested, and candidates challenging Lukashenko had little opportunity to reach out to voters.

The United States has signaled it also will impose a visa ban on Belarusan officials, including Lukashenko, but U.S. law does not allow the publication of the names of people targeted in this way. The United States and European Union had already banned a small number of Belarusan officials because of their alleged roles in the disappearance of opposition figures in the country.

The E.U. has banned only two other heads of state, the leaders of Zimbabwe and Burma.

"We have repeatedly told our European partners about the groundless, far-fetched and useless character of a restrictive policy toward Belarus," a spokesman for the Belarusan Foreign Ministry said before the E.U. meeting. "It is obvious that genuine mutual understanding and constructive interaction are achievable via dialogue alone and cannot be imposed by sanctions."

Officials in Moscow have rejected criticism of the electoral process, and President Vladimir Putin quickly congratulated Lukashenko on his win.

Among those the E.U. banned Monday were the country's ministers of justice, information and education; the head and deputy head of the KGB, as Belarus's internal security service is still known; the chairman of the lower house of parliament; eight election commission officials; three judges; and the head of public television.

Opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich, who got 6 percent of the vote, met with members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, last week and called for hundreds of officials to be banned.

Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/10/AR2006041001287.html

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