BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

January 1, 2006

Ukraine and Belarus, Separated at Birth

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

ELECTIONS will take place this spring in two former Soviet republics, Ukraine and Belarus, that are headed in very different directions after 14 years of independence. The outcomes could reverberate across Europe's eastern frontier.

On March 19, Belarus is to hold a presidential election that will return its autocratic leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, to power. Very few doubt the outcome, because very few believe the election will be fair.

Mr. Lukashenko, a former collective farm boss elected in 1994, has steadily turned Belarus into a miniature version of the Soviet Union itself, with a state-run economy and a security apparatus that punishes dissent.

He has amended the Constitution to increase his power and allow him to seek re-election indefinitely. Criticism has only hardened his stance; in December he pushed through a law criminalizing protests and statements discrediting the state.

"We realize there are no real elections in Belarus," said Aleksandr Dobrovolsky, an adviser to the leading opposition candidate, Aleksandr Milinkevich. "No one is going to count the votes."

Mr. Lukashenko's opponents seem not to be running an election campaign as much as they are trying to organize an uprising.

"We must be prepared to take people out into the street," Mr. Dobrovolsky said.

What he has in mind is what happened next door in Ukraine in 2004, when thousands of people protested a rigged election for a successor to President Leonid D. Kuchma, another autocrat. The protests ultimately swept to power a liberal, Western-style reformer, Viktor A. Yushchenko.

Mr. Yushchenko will face another electoral test on March 26, when Ukraine holds elections for a newly empowered Parliament.

For Mr. Yushchenko, who has vowed to move toward the European Union and NATO, the signs are not promising. The coalition he led to power eventually collapsed amid accusations of corruption. The economy slowed; impatience grew. His bloc has now fallen behind in the polls to a party led by Viktor F. Yanukovich, whose "victory" in 2004 the protests ultimately undid

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/weekinreview/01myer.html

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