Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, is to be banned from travelling to the European Union and United States after riot police in Minsk arrested hundreds of opposition activists protesting against the results of last weekend’s elections.
European leaders, who had been preparing a milder rebuke, decided to ban the president and dozens of members of the Belarus leadership hours after riot police attacked the protesters in the early hours of Friday morning.
The White House followed on Friday night, applying travel restrictions against the Lukashenko government and calling for hundreds of detainees to be released.
The EU ban, which will come into force on April 10, will prevent Lukashenko from travelling to all 25 countries in the union. The EU took the rare step after being briefed about the police operation in Minsk, which ended a four-day demonstration against Sunday’s allegedly fraudulent vote which gave Lukashenko a third term.
The raid began just after 3am on Friday when eight large prison trucks surrounded tents that had sheltered about 300 protesters from the cold of Minsk’s central Oktyabrskaya Square since Monday night. About 50 people sat down when riot police approached, but were quickly dragged into the vans.
Nika Lozovskaya (16) who had been camping since Monday night, said: ”The police ran up to us and said if we did not leave they would use brute force. They barely waited before beating some of us with their hands and batons. Then we went voluntarily into the wagons.”
Lozovskaya said she was too young to face charges, but that 117 others had appeared in court on Friday accused of attending an unsanctioned protest.
The opposition, led by the pro-western academic Alexander Milinkevich, pledged to gather their supporters on the same square at midday on Saturday in a repeat protest to mark Belarus’s brief independence in 1918. Milinkevich, who claims Lukashenko’s re-election was illegitimate, told reporters in Minsk: ”We have scheduled the rally for [March] 25th and we will hold it on the 25th no matter what. We shall avoid any violence.”
Friday’s arrests were intended to deter today’s demonstration, which will be a test of the opposition’s popular support. State television has made only a passing reference to the unprecedented four-day protest and ”tent city”.
Yet Lozovskaya said she and others would continue their demonstrations. ”I’ll be back on the square tonight, and tomorrow,” she said.
European leaders meeting in Brussels were briefed on the raid as they met for their final day of talks on Friday. Austria, which is chairing the talks, had been pressing for a milder form of punishment on the grounds that it was important to maintain a dialogue with the Belarus leadership. But opponents of Lukashenko in the EU seized on the arrests to demand a tougher response.
Stefan Meller, Poland’s Foreign Minister, which had been leading the calls for a tough approach, said: ”Lukashenko will be banned from travelling to the EU.”
The ban came as Russia accused observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which described the election as flawed, of having ”played an inflammatory role”.
The tightly orchestrated poll gave Lukashenko 83% of the vote with a 92% turnout, and prompted 10 000 protesters to flock into the centre of Minsk on Sunday night. Moscow has given its qualified backing to Lukashenko to stop a pro-western opposition coming to power in another of its neighbours after recent upheavals in Ukraine and Georgia. – Guardian Unlimited Â