br23 blog - minsk, belarus

All four potential candidates who’d collected more than 100,000 signatures were registered today by the Central Election Committee as presidential candidates. It means they can officially start campaigning.

Alexander Lukashenka is an authoritarian ruler who’ll be using falsifications schemes and all kinds of illegal means to claim another “elegant victory” (just like he did in 2001).

Siarhiej Hajdukevich is a puppet pseudo-opposition politician, a Russian-speaking snob, a guy who participates in all kinds of “elections” just to create an illusion that there’s freedom and “opposition” in Belarus. He was a friend of Saddam Husseyn, and he was probably involved in the embezzlement of big sums of money within UN’s “Oil for food” programme in Husseyn’s Iraq, but no one has produced clear undeniable evidence of that.

Alexander Kazulin (Kozulin) is a dark horse, a kind of pseudo-opposition, a player that will most probably be helping Lukashenka. For many years he’s been a president of the Belarusian State University, a loyal supporter of Lukashenka, an enemy of the students, and then after he’s been sacked he suddenly became an “opposition activist” and a democrat.

Also there are rumors that Kazulin’s Ph.D. is plagiarized, being an exact replica of another Ph.D. thesis from some Moscow scientist. I read about it today in a blog of a well-known Belarusian political science professor Koktysh from Moscow State University. He claimed he saw the two xeroxed copies, and that it looks very credible. As professor Koktysh put it in his blog, “a simulacrum of a scientist has become a simulacrum of a politician.”

Alexander Milinkevich is our united opposition candidate. He’s our main hope, our ray of light. From what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen he’s a brilliant guy. He speaks four languages (Belarusian, Polish, Russian, French). He’s very calm, smart and knowledgeable. He’s totally pro-democratic, pro-independence, pro Western values. He was greeted by almost everyone abroad. He had meetings with many European presidents and EU Commission chief. The only problem is that Lukashenka and his gang will do everything to hinder Milinkevich. They’ll stop ay nothing. Here is just another example of this from today (one out of hundreds other cases):

17 February 2006 — About 100 opposition supporters were arrested in Belarus today as they tried to join a celebration to mark the registration of their candidate Alexander Milinkevich for next month’s presidential election. AFP says the Milinkevich supporters were arrested on various pretexts, such as the state of their vehicles or problems with their identity papers.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Belarusian politics, Milinkevich. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.