BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

25/06/2008

Belarus sets poll for September 28

MINSK: Belarus, determined to disprove Western allegations that it violates human rights, announced a September 28 election yesterday to a parliament where the opposition holds no seats. President Alexander Lukashenko, barred from entering the US and the European Union, pledged a fair vote to prove his ex-Soviet state was a democracy.

But the liberal and nationalist opposition said little would change even if some opposition parliamentarians did win seats.

Speaking after a presidential decree announcing the date was issued, Lukashenko said the election would allay any doubts about fundamental rights being upheld in his country.

“We want to show the West, and Russia, how to conduct an election,” he told the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda in remarks reported by the BELTA news agency.

“We will do it so democratically that you can be sure the outcome is real and see who has the people’s support. We want to do it openly, democratically so that no one will criticise us and we can say: ‘What more do you people want from Belarus?’”

Last month Lukashenko said that having the opposition in parliament would help Belarus’s image but that he doubted whether opposition parties would get enough votes to win seats.

Nikolai Lazovik, secretary of Belarus’s Central Election Commission, said new rules would allow opposition parties to play a role in the commission’s affairs. No election in Belarus has been recognised as fair since the mid-1990s. “I would like very much this time for the opposition to have no grounds to complain about us in any way,” he told Reuters.

The US and the European Union have slapped a visa ban on Lukashenko and dozens of other officials on the grounds that he rigged his landslide re-election in 2006.

But Lukashenko, in power since 1994, remains broadly popular among his almost 10mn people, many of whom approve of his notion of strong government.

Opposition activist Anatoly Lebedko said the main issue was how many opponents the president would allow into parliament.

“The only difference in the new parliament may be the addition of four, five or six opposition members,” Lebedko told Reuters. Some in the West, he said, would endorse the poll.

“We don’t need a few opposition members of parliament,” he said. “What we do need is an honest election.” Lukashenko has been trying to cultivate better relations with the West, especially the European Union. Several detainees were freed from prison and Western ambassadors suggested a successful September poll would help end Belarus’s isolation.

But Belarus’s most prominent detainee, academic Alexander Kozulin, remains in prison, convicted of helping stage protests against the president’s re-election.

Western states have demanded his release as a pre-condition for further talks. – Reuters

Source:

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=226302&version=1&template_id=39&parent_id=21

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