In Belarus, Little Hope for Opposition Victory

Shortly before dawn Tuesday, opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich, wan, haggard and freezing, toured the small camp in the center of Oktyabrskaya Square that has become the ragged fortress of the democratic opposition in Belarus.

“Our president!” the 300 or so young supporters still left cheered as Milinkevich moved among the sagging plastic tents, his constituency swathed in blankets and bouncing on their toes. For dinner, there had been only hot tea and crackers after police seized bags of food brought in by supporters and arrested anyone, including Milinkevich’s two sons, caught trying to smuggle in a warm coat.

By Tuesday night, leaders of Belarus’ democratic coalition were debating whether to ask their supporters to spend more nights in the relentless snow, or prepare to admit failure in their bid to ignite a public revolt against Sunday’s questionable election results that returned President Alexander Lukashenko to five more years in office.

The coalition made a last call for 100,000 supporters to come out Saturday, a banned holiday celebrating the independence of the original short-lived republic of Belarus in 1918.

“Ask your brothers, ask your neighbors, ask people who can come from other regions to come, to show them that we are a force,” Milinkevich said.

The dilemma over whether to continue occupying the square marked a crucial juncture in Belarus’ postelection landscape, and underscored the differences between the recent nonviolent revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and the situation in Belarus, whose repressive Soviet-style government has ruled for 12 years with a powerful combination of nostalgia, defiance and fear.

“Many people have come out, and Minsk didn’t experience for 10 years such a massive rally as it did on Sunday,” Sergei Voznyak, Milinkevich’s campaign spokesman, said in an interview. “But even those numbers were not sufficient enough to resolve the serious political challenges we face. We haven’t reached critical mass to break the situation in our favor, I’m afraid.”

Police have arrested more than 100 protesters since Monday, but have failed to move in and clear the central square despite Lukashenko’s earlier pledge to “wring the necks” of those who disrupt stability.

Yet as Milinkevich and fellow pro-democracy candidate Alexander Kozulin talked of asking supporters to leave Tuesday night -- fearing a police raid, or the harsh effects of the weather -- it was the youthful tent camp organizers themselves who insisted that they were not prepared to leave. Not when going home, for many, meant the possibility of losing everything they had risked in coming.

“You must understand, it will cost me my studies, it will cost me my work if we don’t succeed. So I have no way to go back,” said Antol Liaszczou, a 22-year-old computer programming student.

“Those who are caught by the police are expelled from the universities the next day,” he said, pointing to the dozens of plainclothes police standing in huddles outside the perimeter of the tent camp -- and chasing down many of those who left. “This is the only free part of Belarus. It’s the safest place in Minsk right now.”

“We have to continue our protest as long as physically possible. Many people have the sentiment, now or never, and I’m among them,” said Alexander Atroshchankau, an activist with the banned Zubr youth movement.

“We are seeing what unprecedented measures the authorities are resorting to. Hundreds of people are arrested in the streets and thrown into prison. In the last few days, they’ve even stopped bothering to press charges,” he said. “If it is a defeat, God forbid, this time, the situation will spiral down. The opposition, all the members of the opposition, will be thrown behind bars.

“We have to strive for this chance, because we have no other chances.”

In interviews, large numbers of youthful activists said Milinkevich and his advisors erred by not instantly mobilizing the 10,000 supporters who turned out for the election day rally, when large numbers of Belarusians were moved to protest Lukashenko’s improbable claim of an 82.6% victory. The protesters have called for a new election, a demand echoed by the Bush administration.

Instead of setting up a tent camp on the spot, they said, democratic coalition leaders told them to go home and return for another rally the next night, costing the budding protest movement crucial momentum and numbers.

By Tuesday night, only a few thousand ralliers joined a few hundred hard-core protesters in the crowded camp, now amply supplied with food and bedding.

“We expected so much more,” said Dmitry Kozlovsky, a 21-year-old law student who, like many, arrived for the initial rally Sunday prepared to dig in for a revolution.

“We should never have been dispersed the first night,” he said. “It would have been better to have marched on the Central Election Commission. And what happened as a result was many people didn’t show up last night -- they didn’t understand why they had assembled the first night to begin with. They expected some action, and instead they were sent home. Why?”

Yekaterina Tkachenko, a spokeswoman for the United Civil Party, a part of the Milinkevich coalition, said organizers had not expected to see 10,000 people in the street Sunday night, and were unprepared to direct them.

“Initially, nobody believed that the authorities would allow the mass rally to happen in Oktyabrskaya Square in the first place, because the scare campaign was pretty serious,” she said. “The organizers never expected that so many people would come. And I think that the first impression of euphoria made some heads go dizzy. They didn’t elaborate a plan.”

Yet under the stone-cold stars that gave way to blowing snow, a plan formed.

Passersby hid food bags under their coats and thrust through the human barrier ringing the tent camp. By Tuesday afternoon there were cakes and soup, hot casseroles and pies. Teenage boys tossed boxes of crackers into the camp.

In the predawn cold, campers ran loops around the perimeter to keep warm, hoisting the banned Belarusian nationalist flag in front of them.

Tatiana Vanina, a 46-year-old mother of two, helped organize the food and cleaned up the remnants. When young activists sank down into the snow, she pushed a piece of carpeting under them. When the temperature dropped, she played her guitar.

“Everyone here is between 18 and 25. We understood that we couldn’t go and leave these children alone, because my feeling is these children are angels who descended from heaven to save this country,” she said.

The worst moment, she said, was at dawn, when an army of snowplows accompanied by police cars began lumbering toward the protesters, coming within inches and kicking up a choking swirl of snow and dirt with their rotating brushes.

“They were circling around us, no more than 5 or 10 centimeters from our feet -- huge, metallic, intimidating. But the children were standing, holding arms, and no one retreated,” she said.

Yet many later decamped, and fewer came to replace them, at least at first.

Tkachenko is a veteran of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and after a night in the subfreezing temperatures in the flimsy tents of Minsk, a world away from the orderly food deliveries and portable heaters in Kiev, she said she had realized that Belarus is not yet Ukraine.

Analysts say Ukraine protesters, who at times numbered in the hundreds of thousands, had assets not available to those in Belarus, including an independent television station and newspapers that carried their message, wealthy businessmen who backed the opposition, and ultimately, political forces in the government and security structures who abandoned their support for the former president. By contrast, Minsk protesters were limited to e-mail and a single text message sent to supporters.

“Now we have a clear understanding that we won’t be able to repeat that experience, for many reasons. And it’s not only the question of the lack of an independent mass media, or the strong position of Russia in Belarus,” she said.

“The problem is that our young people are not ready for this. What happened on the 19th is a small victory, and we saw that we are many and we will not be easily intimidated. But I don’t think we have enough physical resources to last.”