BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

05/04/2006

Belarusian opposition leader calls for "freedom volunteers" to educate compatriots

MINSK, Belarus (AP) - Opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich called Wednesday for tens of thousands of Belarusian volunteers to educate their compatriots about freedom, and said free elections, free speech and free education would be the main planks in the opposition program.

President Alexander Lukashenko has faced international condemnation of the March 19 election, which he won with 83 percent of the vote according to official results. Milinkevich, who received only around 6 percent, has alleged widespread fraud.

Thousands of people demonstrated in central Minsk after the election to protest the result, and hundreds of opposition protesters remain in jail after the breakup of a protest tent camp in a central square and a violent clash between demonstrators and riot police.

In an address to the Belarusian people that was posted on his Web site Wednesday, Milinkevic said the opposition was transforming "a wonderful, romantic impulse of a courageous minority" into a mass movement in the authoritarian former Soviet state.

The movement will collect signatures for a petition to demand changes in the election code and call for parliamentary and local council deputies to be recalled.

Independent television and radio stations for Belarusians had been established abroad, he said. Milinkevich promised "maximum support" for print media, saying it was essential to break authorities' monopoly on the media, which he said had been created "for the stupefaction, intimidation and insult of their own people."

According to the Web posting, Milinkevich's movement, which still has no formal name, will create universities in Belarus and will help transfer expelled students to European universities.

Milinkevich predicted his opposition movement would be victorious if hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in the capital, Minsk.

"We will not retreat but are moving toward a siege of the regime," Milinkevich said. "We don't have the right to hover in the clouds of romantic dreaming about the fast and immediate arrival of freedom."

He said the aim of the movement would be the "peaceful uprooting of dictatorship" in Belarus and said protests were just part of the strategy.

He said Lukashenko's election victory was achieved "with the aid of violence and lies." The president's influence in society is "inexorably declining," he said.

The European Union and the United States, who criticized the election as having been marred by irregularities and intimidation, have said they would impose sanctions on Lukashenko, including a visa ban and a freeze on his overseas assets.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called on the European Union on Wednesday to start a dialogue with Belarus.

"I am convinced that if the European Union has some questions about government activities in this or that country, it is necessary to regulate them through dialogue

and not through an attempt to isolate the country in European affairs," the RIA-Novosti news agency quoted Lavrov as saying in the Slovak capital Bratislava.

Source:

http://www.kyivpost.com/bn/24186/