Vanguard News Network

[Note the focus is entirely on the protest, rather than the results. Who cares what jew-operated rent-a-mobs want? What matters is keeping Belarus Whites safe from the international mafia that is Big Jew.]

Belarus president re-elected

Opposition claims fraud; thousands protest

by Yuras Karmanau

MINSK, Belarus — Thousands of protesters thronged the main square of the Belarusian capital Sunday in defiance of a government ban, refusing to recognize a presidential vote that gave a landslide, and largely expected, victory to the iron-fisted incumbent.

President Alexander Lukashenko won 82.6 percent of the vote compared with 6 percent for Alexander Milinkevich, the main opposition candidate, the Central Election Commission chief said early today, citing a nearly complete preliminary count from Sunday’s balloting. Turnout was 92.6 percent, the commission said.

“We demand new, honest elections,” Milinkevich told the crowd Sunday evening. “This was a complete farce.”

Milinkevich called on the crowd, which began thinning under a heavy snow, to return to the square this evening, signaling the opposition would try to hold a sustained protest of the sort that brought down long-lived regimes in former Soviet republics including Ukraine and Georgia.

“They say we want a revolution,” Milinkevich told thousands of protesters who gathered, peacefully, in October Square as the polls closed at 8 p.m. “No. We want only free and fair elections. What happened here was a farce. We do not recognize this election.”

The protest, drawing several thousand despite the snow and bitter cold, was the largest in years against Lukashenko, who is often denounced here and abroad as the last dictator in Europe. The protesters waved flags — including the former national flag, now banned, and that of the European Union, officially scorned — and chanted slogans demanding freedom.

“All they are saying is lies,” said Tatyana Agechich, as official statements were being broadcast on a large-screen television in the square, accompanied by jeers. Agechich is an engineer who said she lost her job for disloyalty to Lukashenko’s government.

Although the authorities banned Election Day rallies and the country’s security service, still known as the KGB, warned that anyone causing disturbances could face charges of terrorism, the protest passed without the violent crackdown that many feared.

Scores of police officers and security troops assembled in buses on side streets but did not intervene. At times, the protesters, estimated between 5,000 and 10,000, broke into chants, “The police are with us.”

Underlying the election is a struggle for regional influence between Russia and the West, which is seen by Lukashenko’s government and its backers in Moscow as a major culprit in the political upheaval in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.

Lukashenko accuses the West of plotting a repeat in Belarus, one of the few former Soviet republics still loyal to the Kremlin.

Alexander Kozulin, another opposition candidate, demanded authorities release what he said were hundreds of opposition activists detained during the campaign.

Western countries have forged close ties with the opposition and made no secret of their contempt for the ruler of what Washington calls an outpost of tyranny in Europe. The United States has condemned the campaign as “seriously flawed and tainted.”

Lukashenko dismissed international criticism.