BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

26/04/2006

Belarus' opposition grappling for strategy to keep up momentum

GOMEL, Belarus (AP) - Just six weeks after Gomel gave opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich a shot in the arm with an unexpectedly massive rally, the city was giving him barely a glance.

"Look, Milinkevich is alive," a youth sitting on a bench said with apparent irony on Tuesday as Milinkevich and some aides walked through a downtown park.

The slight was a far cry from the cheers of some 5,000 that had boosted his spirits in the waning days of his unsuccessful electoral campaign to unseat authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko - a surprising turnout for a campaign that had little money and practically no coverage by state-controlled media.

Nor was his meeting with a few dozen supporters in the center of the park anything like the thousands who gathered daily in the capital Minsk to protest election fraud - a week of demonstrations unprecedented in a country where protests routinely are dispersed quickly and violently.

The sparse turnout on Tuesday didn't necessarily reflect that Milinkevich's movement against Lukashenko, characterized in the West as "Europe's last dictator," is losing support. But it did highlight the obstacles he faces and how the opposition he leads is grappling for a strategy.

Milinkevich's visit to Gomel was intended to center on appearing at an opposition-organized conference on the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion that occurred 20 years ago Wednesday, covering nearly a quarter of Belarus' territory with radioactive fallout. The opposition contends Lukashenko's government severely and cynically underplays the damage done to the country by Chernobyl.

But Gomel authorities denied permission for the opposition to use any public hall in the city for the conference and also banned Milinkevich from holding a public meeting with supporters. That left the conference to be held in a small house used as a makeshift local opposition headquarters - netting is strung up in the backyard to block what the opposition says is a KGB surveillance camera on an adjacent building - and forced Milinkevich to limit his conclave in the park to about 20 minutes to try to avoid charges of holding an unsanctioned public meeting.

The opposition hopes for a large turnout at a Chernobyl rally in Minsk on Wednesday, which authorities have permitted but with an array of stipulations that show unwillingness to give the opposition any significant foothold.

The opposition wanted to hold the demonstration in Oktyabrskaya Square, the central Minsk plaza that was the site of the March protests that got wide international media coverage. But authorities say they can only gather there in preparation for a march to the Academy of Sciences, about 3 kilometers (2 miles) away. In addition, Milinkevich says, police have banned any "political leaders" such as himself from being on the square for the beginning of the march.

Amid such limitations, and faced with continuing arrests of prominent figures including the Tuesday sentencing of Milinkevich's Gomel chief of staff to 10 days in jail, the opposition clearly is in a bind.

Lukashenko and Belarusian state media claim that the opposition is receiving significant foreign funding in a Western plot to oust the president, who has no limit on how long he can stay in office.

But Tuesday's conference indicated a bare-bones operation. The only reference materials were a handful of poorly photocopied newspaper articles about Chernobyl. The room was notably lacking in the propaganda material that is a staple of opposition movements: only a photo of Milinkevich and two posters on the wall, along with a small banner from a Rotary Club branch in Florida.

Such minimal resources stand in sharp contrast to the array of tents and food and equipment that the Ukrainian opposition was able to mobilize in that country's 2004 "Orange Revolution." Absent that, the Belarusian opposition is focusing on a long campaign of grassroots work to inform their countrymen.

"When people begin to know the truth, they begin to protest," Alexander Bukhvostov of the opposition Trud party told the conference.

Milinkevich said the opposition plans to hold another demonstration in Minsk on May 1, and then to hold off on rallies - possibly until next March.

"We do not have the goal of conducting street actions, but of working intensively with the population," he told The Associated Press. "But if we find that street actions would help us, we will change our tactics."

Source:

http://www.kyivpost.com/bn/24340/

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