BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

12/12/2006

Kozulin ends hunger strike after 54 days

Associated Press

MINSK, Belarus - A jailed former opposition presidential candidate, Alexander Kozulin, ended a hunger strike Tuesday after refusing food for 54 days, his lawyer said.

Kozulin ended his hunger strike on the same day as another Belarusian opposition leader and former presidential candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, was awarded the European Union's top human rights award, the Sakharov Prize, for his fight for democracy in the former Soviet republic.

Milinkevich dedicated his prize to Kozulin.

"This prize is, of course, his," he told the European Parliament at the award ceremony in Strasbourg, France.

Kozulin has been jailed since March, when he led a protest march following presidential elections in which he was one of three candidates challenging authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko. He had been on hunger strike to protest his sentencing in June to 5 1/2 years in prison for organizing the unsanctioned protest.

"Kozulin chose life, which was already hanging by a thread," attorney Igor Rynkevich said.

Kozulin's wife, Irina, also told The Associated Press that her husband had told her over the phone that he was ending the protest.

Rynkevich said that Kozulin was near critical condition after having lost 88 pounds during his imprisonment.

"At this stage of a hunger strike, deprivation of oxygen to the brain begins ... the kidneys can fail, there have already been heart irregularities," Rynkevich said.

Kozulin is imprisoned in the city of Vitebsk, 185 miles northeast of the capital of Minsk and is living in a barracks with 19 other inmates.

Lukashenko has ruled Belarus since 1994, quashing dissent and maintaining power through elections which have been dismissed by critics abroad and at home as illegitimate.

Source:

http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/news/breaking_news/16223345.htm