Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- September 10, 2001 Belarus Leader Claims Big Election Victory, but Many Doubt It By MICHAEL WINES INSK, Belarus, Sept. 9 — This most Soviet of former Soviet states today held its first presidential election in seven years, but only after stripping many election observers of credentials and censoring the Internet in an effort to project its leader, President Aleksandr Lukashenko, as the people's overwhelming choice. State television stamped it official late tonight, announcing that Mr. Lukashenko had amassed nearly 81 percent of the vote in the first 90 minutes of vote-counting after the polls closed at 8 p.m. But few Belarussians believed that, if conversations with voters this weekend were any indication. Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe were completing a report late today that is expected to state that while there was no proof of fraud, the vote contained all the ingredients for the vote to have been manipulated. A coalition of civic groups that mounted what it called a parallel vote count, personally observing the tabulations at 150 of Belarus's 6,700 polling places chosen to mirror the country at large, suggested that the results were different. The parallel count was hamstrung tonight when phone service to the project was cut off for two hours. Early projections nevertheless indicated that Mr. Lukashenko had captured not 81 percent of the vote, but something closer to 61 percent. Reuters President Aleksandr Lukashenko at a news conference in Minsk Sunday after the election. Lukashenko Claims Victory ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- The actions of Mr. Lukashenko's government in the final hours of campaigning — from arrests and harassment of political opponents to refusal to issue detailed, precinct-by- precinct vote counts — seemed to belie any notion that it was confident of its own people's support. The director of the principal election-monitoring section of the European group, Hrair Balian, said in an interview today that election laws and the presidential campaign itself exhibited "fundamental problems," but that the government had resisted observers' calls for change. "I've told them time and time again in the last three weeks, `If you want to gain the confidence of the public, publish the results,' " he said. "And there's no answer." Svetlana Tenitskaya, a 40-year-old Minsk resident who went her polling place today only to find that someone had already voted for her, said that was answer enough. "It seems to me that every vote has already been counted," she said at 5 p.m., three hours before the polls closed. "And the result has been falsified." Even the total from the parallel counters was subject to the vagaries of the Belarussian electoral process. Polls by an independent wire service indicate that Mr. Lukashenko's actual support runs below 40 percent of the voting-age population. But even the parallel count amounted to a bitter defeat for Mr. Lukashenko's chief opponent, the labor-union leader Vladimir Goncharik, and the coalition of democratic forces and anti-Lukashenko Communists who supported him. Still, it was not unexpected. By many independent accounts, Europe has not had an election this stage- managed since before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The opposition tried to rally voters around disclosures linking the government to the 1999 disappearances and apparent killings of two popular democratic politicians, Viktor Gonchar and Anatoly Karpenko. But Mr. Goncharik, a wooden politician, at best, was almost invisible during the monthlong campaign. The few sizable opposition newspapers were so systematically harassed — their presses sealed and editions confiscated — that many of the 10 million people of Belarus were either unaware of the charges or convinced by the state-dominated news media that they were bogus. In an election-day coda to the news media campaign, Internet users here abruptly lost access today to between 12 and 20 Web sites run by Mr. Lukashenko's critics. They included the Goncharik campaign site; the Internet version of a leading independent newspaper, Belaruskaya Delovaya Gazeta; and the popular news briefing posted daily by the antigovernment group Charter 97. Access to the Web sites, as well as to e-mail service, which had been interrupted, was partly restored this afternoon, said Yuri Polevikov, a Web official for the Goncharik site. Efforts to ensure an honest vote were also hobbled on Saturday, when the Central Election Commission stripped the credentials of up to 3,000 of the 12,000 election observers assembled by civic groups. All the decertified monitors were from the human rights group Vesna, or Spring, which had provided legal and technical support during the monitoring and the parallel vote count. Mr. Balian stressed that his European organization had no direct evidence that the vote was fraudulent. But what he called a government campaign of smears and intimidation against monitors, both local and from his group, hindered the ability to ensure a fair vote, he said. In and around Minsk today, as voters obediently lined up to register and vote in school auditoriums and town halls, the scene could often have been likened to that on an election day in rural Iowa. And in some places, even independent monitors said the balloting, as far as they could tell, appeared orderly. But even those who had not personally seen something suspicious almost always had an account about someone who had. And those who had seen something were not hard to find. In the farm village of Novoseoye, 20 miles outside Minsk, Gennadi Tolyarchok, a bacteriologist at a veterinary research institute, said voting at the precinct he was monitoring today appeared free of tampering. But his other job, as an official of the local branch of the pro-democracy Belarussian National Front, was a different matter. As he left a pre- election meeting last week, he said, the police seize him and three other party members and took him to a district station for a two-and-a-half hour interrogation and search. And several miles away, in a down-at-the-heels Minsk district called Sovetskaya, Elena V. Gromyko told how she and other monitors had counted a number of early voters at her precinct, reaching a total of 80, only to learn that election officials had recorded 165. Then today, she said in an interview, a man who came in to vote discovered that his father-in-law, an invalid, had mistakenly been recorded as casting a ballot. At another table a few seats away, a Sovetskaya district official, Irina I. Vetovskaya, insisted that Ms. Gromyko had it all wrong. And in any case, it did not matter. "When the results of this election are made public," Ms. Vetovskaya said, smiling, "I think you will see that one vote is not very important." ------------------------------------------------- This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been shut down ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9spWA Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [email protected] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
