U.S. To Impose Sanctions On Belarusan Leaders

WASHINGTON, DC -- The White House today denounced the suppression of political protests against election fraud in Belarus and said the United States plans to join European nations in imposing sanctions on Belarusan leaders.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan
In a morning news briefing, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the United States demands the immediate release of hundreds of protesters who have been arrested for demonstrating against the reportedly rigged March 19 elections, which President Alexander Lukashenko claims to have won with 83 percent of the vote.

Riot police broke up days of demonstrations in Minsk, the Belarusan capital, early today, arresting about 200 protesters who had been camped out in the main square and driving them away in trucks.

The opposition, whose candidate received only 6 percent of the vote, charged that the election was blatantly fraudulent, an assertion backed by independent election observers and the United States.

Under Lukashenko, 51, a former Soviet collective farm manager who came to power in 1994 as an anti-corruption crusader, Belarus has become one of the world's "outposts of tyranny," as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has described half a dozen authoritarian countries.

But the man dubbed by Western critics as "Europe's last dictator" has won the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose foreign minister defended today's police action against the protesters.

McClellan told reporters, "The United States calls on authorities in Belarus to release without delay the hundreds of citizens who have been detained not only in the past 24 hours but in recent days and weeks simply for expressing their political views."

He said that "we strongly condemn the actions by Belarusan security services," who "forcibly seized and detained citizens of Belarus who were peacefully demonstrating against the fraudulent March 19th election results."

Praising the European Council's decision to impose sanctions on Belarusan leaders, McClellan said, "We plan to take parallel steps involving targeted travel restrictions and financial sanctions." The U.S. sanctions appeared likely to include travel restrictions against Lukashenko and other top Belarusan officials.

McClellan said the United States urges "all members of the international community to demand that authorities in Belarus respect the rights of their own citizens to express themselves peacefully and to condemn any and all abuses."

Lukashenko has denied being a dictator but has freely acknowledged his authoritarian tendencies.

"An authoritarian style of rule is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it," he said in 2003, according to a BBC profile. "You need to control the country, and the main thing is not to ruin people's lives."

On his English-language Web site, he makes no mention of the latest crackdown on the opposition, but says: "Being the President, I sometimes have to take unpopular decisions. I know that I will not be liked because of that.

But my objective is to urge everybody to love the country where we live and respect the authorities which have never abandoned the people in grief." He adds, "To protect people is my main job."

Election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe concluded that the March 19 polls were not free and fair, citing a "pattern of intimidation" by the state throughout the campaign.

However, some Western and Russian polling organizations have found considerable popular support for Lukashenko in Belarus, which has recorded strong economic growth under his presidency and has avoided some of the pitfalls of the transition to capitalism experienced by other former Soviet republics.

Lukashenko began his political career in 1990 when he was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Belarus shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. He founded a group called Communists for Democracy and voted against dissolving the Soviet Union. But he ran for president in 1994 as a populist independent dedicated to cleaning up government corruption.

He angered the United States in the late 1990s by exporting arms to U.S. adversaries, including Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Yugoslavia.

Source: The Washington Post