Deal Falls Apart on Eve of Belarus Vote

The hard-line president and his parliamentary foes scrapped a Moscow-brokered settlement of their dispute Saturday, feeding fears of political collapse on the eve of a hotly debated referendum.

Meanwhile in Moscow, military officials said all Soviet-era nuclear weapons formerly in Belarus are now in Russia--the last of the warheads having been shipped out shortly after Russian leaders mediated the Belarus political deal.

Voters in this former Soviet republic decide today whether to support President Alexander G. Lukashenko’s bid to expand his already vast authority by extending his term to 2001 and giving him broad authority to select legislators and judges.

His opposition in parliament resumed impeachment proceedings Saturday after having agreed the day before to halt them in the Moscow-mediated deal in exchange for Lukashenko agreeing that the referendum would be nonbinding.

Saturday, Lukashenko decreed that the vote would be mandatory, in effect canceling the compromise signed at dawn Friday and mediated by Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin.

“It’s not a choice between the president and parliament. It’s a choice between chaos on one hand, and discipline and order,” Lukashenko said in a nationally televised address Saturday night. “I’m not calling you to the streets, like my opponents do, but to the polling stations.”

Nationalists, angered by Lukashenko’s policy of moving closer to Moscow’s orbit, are threatening to boycott the referendum and stage protests across this impoverished nation of 10.4 million on Russia’s western border.

The Constitutional Court met in a special session Saturday to discuss how to proceed.

In Moscow, Col. Gen. Viktor Yesin, head of the Russian strategic rocket troops, told the Interfax news agency that the withdrawal of the Soviet-era nuclear weapons based in Belarus was completed Saturday.

Pavel Daneiko, a member of the Belarussian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said the last of the 81 missiles on Belarussian territory was sent out Friday, after Chernomyrdin and other officials had brokered the political compromise.

Belarus, along with Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, inherited part of the Soviet nuclear arsenal when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Under international agreements, the arms were to be shipped to Russia to be dismantled. Ukraine and Kazakhstan have already sent back their weapons.