Belarus’ Solidarity Demonstration
Today there was supposed to be yet another solidarity demonstration in Minsk, but it was brutally dispersed by the police:
BBC: Dozens arrested in Belarus demos
And tomorrow it’ll be finally known whether our main opposition candidate Milinkevich will be registered or not. There’s already a small scandal regarding the Central election committee. Lukashenka’s officials denied entry to tomorrow’s “open” conference to virtually all journalists and photographers (from Associated Press, BBC, France Press, everyone else), but BelTA, the Lukashenka’s pocket “news” agency. They also sent a warning to Milinkevich that he shouldn’t bring along any of his political allies, such as leaders of the opposition political parties.
The good news is that if Milinkevich is registered, he’ll be able to start campaigning inside Belarus. By the way, he put an announcement on his website asking his followers to come to October square tomorrow at noon, “to congratulate him with a successful registration as a presidential candidate.” I guess, this is also a precautionary measure. If he doesn’t get registered, there could be some serious trouble, and he needs his supporters.
On the other hand, Lukashenka’s regime doesn’t have strong reasons not to register him, because Lukashenka’s gang already is playing a well-known “cat and mouse” game with him and has a functional fool-proof falsification mechanism (that was successfully tested in 2001 and 2005). They can easily repeat the trick in 2006. Or so they think.
