BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

Feb 08 2006

U.S. to spend millions in Belarus to ensure free, fair voting in next month's elections

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States is spending millions of dollars to ensure the voting in Belarus' presidential election next month is free and fair, the State Department said Tuesday.

Dan Fried, the assistant secretary of state for Europe, said he and European officials have met with Alexander Milinkevich, the main opposition candidate in the March 19 election. Fried insisted, however, that neither the United States nor the European Union has thrown its official support behind Milinkevich's candidacy.

"Our position is not to pick winners. Our position is to do what we can to promote a free and fair election," Fried told reporters. "It is also true that the Belarusian opposition has united around Milinkevich."

Still, he said, "as far as I can tell, the opposition is a collection of different groups with different political views, but they are now united around a platform of democracy and basically a kind of democratic patriotism."

The former Soviet republic's president, Alexander Lukashenko, has been in power since the creation of independent Belarus in 1994. While the Belarusian constitution limited the presidency to two five-year terms, he had it changed in a 2004 referendum that the United States says was neither free nor fair by international standards.

Lukashenko, an ally of Moscow, is now standing for a third term.

Fried said Congress has provided more than $21 million (-17.5 million) to finance pro-democracy activities in the landlocked country surrounded by Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.

"In historical experience, you do what you can to send two messages: to exert diplomatic pressure on authoritarian regimes, to support civil society," Fried said. "And that's what you do, and in many cases democracy advances in ways that you don't expect."

The historical experience he referred to was the uprisings in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, where throngs of demonstrators took to the streets and made their countries ungovernable after disputed elections returned unpopular rulers to power.

"Our support is for democracy, not a particular path to it," he said. "I don't want to create the impression that we see the only outcome as being some massive street-based change. As I said, our assumption is that after the election, this would be a long-term process."

Milinkevich said Friday at a democracy conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, that "I have no doubt the people of Belarus will come into the streets if the government tries to fake the election." He added: "We do not want revolution, only just and fair elections."

Fried said the United States would not any under circumstances "support street violence even in response to flawed elections."

Still, he said, "Peaceful demonstrations are a right, and certainly we're not going to suggest that people don't exercise that right. So that's what happens. It's not up to us.

"But under no circumstances would we support violence. That is not what we do, and that is not what we favor."

Source:

http://www.kyivpost.com/top/23828/