The End of the Elections
Vincuk Viachorka, the deputy Head of Milinkevich’s campaign office in Belarus, who was arrested yesterday, was sentenced today to 15 days of prison by Minsk City court, together with several other top members of Milinkevich’s team. (a bit of math: elections are in 10 days, and he has to spend 14 days more behind bars).
Vincuk Viachorka said that this means Alexander Lukashenka has decapitated Milinkevich’s team before the presidential elections.
When journalists in the court house tried to approach Vincuk Viachorka to get comments, they were beaten up.
If that’s not clear enough message, I can spell it out for you: our dictator just said “game over.” This is the end of our elections game. Lukashenka was getting too scared, and today he stopped playing cat and mouse with the opposition, because the cat was obviously getting very frightened.
Interestingly, on the same day Russian observers said that the election campaign in Belarus is going smoothly, that everything is fine and according to the law and constitution. Those Russian observers expect the presidential elections to be free and fair.
March 9th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
I’m really sad to hear about this development in your elections. It’s a terrible violation of democracy. In February I wrote a blog on this topic (http://freddies-world.blogspot.com/2006/02/democracy-of-deception.html) and it’s a subject I follow with great interest.
April 6th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
[…] Milinkevich had to visit a doctor in Strasbourg, at the European Parliament. Actually he didn’t want to, but his companion Vincuk Viachorka (the one that was arrested just before the “elections”) insisted that he looks too tired. The doctors took an EKG and measured blood pressure, and said that EKG looks great, but his blood pressure was too high. It’s just fatigue and stress, they said, and recommended him to take a rest. […]