Belarus President Claims Victory

President Alexander G. Lukashenko, brushing off accusations that his loyalists cheated and falsified election results, laid claim to victory Sunday and five more years as leader of this former Soviet republic.

Lukashenko, accused by two former prosecutors who have fled the country of authorizing secret death squads to eliminate critics, received 75.6% of the vote, the Central Election Commission reported today.

He thanked supporters in a late-night television appearance and called his country of 10 million people “the victor nation” for producing such a lopsided margin for him.

“For the first time in all of modern history, dirty PR technologies have been defeated,” he boasted, referring to opponents’ frequent characterization of him as “Europe’s last dictator.”

Such criticism, however, was limited to the foreign press and a handful of small, much-harassed independent domestic papers. The government-controlled media here have fostered an image of Lukashenko as a hard-working, earthy and energetic president who understands Belarus better than the opposition. His foes usually are portrayed as a collection of American-paid, Western lackeys.

Asked about the death-squad accusation Sunday, Lukashenko, a former collective farm director, replied: “Let us not talk about death. It is a happy day.”

Shortly before midnight, the election commission had said that trade union leader Vladimir Goncharik won 12.54% and the third candidate, Sergei Gaydukevich, received 2.23%.

Goncharik, behind whom most of the Belarussian opposition united, called the margin “clearly a falsification” and alleged that people working on Lukashenko’s behalf had almost doubled the number of votes actually given to the president.

Speaking to The Times at a rain-soaked rally of about 2,000 supporters, many waving a historical white-and-red Belarussian flag banned by Lukashenko’s government, Goncharik said, “We received no less than 40%, and there should be a second round of voting.”

Goncharik said he would protest what he called “monstrous” vote-rigging, and he urged Western countries to deem the election illegitimate.

Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said they would announce their assessment of the election at a news conference today.

Police did not interfere with the pro-Goncharik rally outside the Palace of the Republic in central Minsk, the capital. Youths blew whistles and repeatedly shouted “Shame!” “Long live Belarus!” and “Freedom, freedom!”

Reflecting fears that authorities might carry out reprisals, most people at the rally did not want their last names used. A 38-year-old schoolteacher, who identified herself only as Alla, said: “The regime has not been held accountable for a single crime that it committed, and this is where the danger lies.”

Despite its frustration, the crowd was well behaved. But around midnight, after it had dwindled to a few hundred people, a handful of youths broke windows at a government culture palace despite pleas for calm from officials of Goncharik’s campaign.

Several opposition activists said it was debatable whether an election had taken place at all.

“You can call what has been happening here ‘elections’ only in the sense that you could call what used to happen in the Soviet Union ‘elections,’ ” newspaper editor Alexander Starikevich said.

Goncharik said election posters were routinely torn down as soon as they appeared. Police frequently stopped opposition election meetings, campaign workers were detained, meeting places suddenly ordered moved and leaflets confiscated.

The opposition was incensed that about 15% of the votes reportedly were cast in advance of election day. Lukashenko loyalists in charge of collective farms, state-owned factories, the military and universities had worked to bring out this so-called “early vote,” which they defended as a convenience to voters.

Opposition figures said the early votes were needed to create a large, unsupervised pool of ballots that could easily be tampered with out of monitors’ view.

Lukashenko was scornful of Hans-Georg Wieck, the diplomat who headed the OSCE monitoring group.

“With all the attacks he made on the eve of the elections, he should have understood he ought to leave [the country]. He wanted to slam the door on us, but we have not allowed him. . . . It will be the people who will slam the door on him.” If Wieck does not leave Belarus voluntarily, the president added, “We will help him.”

Already in office 7 1/2 years, and now claiming he has won five more, Lukashenko seemed to hint at an ambition to change the constitution so that he can remain even longer.

“Who says this will be my last term?” he asked reporters.

Lukashenko’s critics accuse him of selling out Belarus’ sovereignty--which was regained in 1991 when the collapse of the Soviet Union ended two centuries of Russian and Soviet rule--to garner Kremlin support.

Pavel P. Borodin, a Kremlin insider under investigation by Swiss prosecutors in an alleged kickback scheme, was in Belarus to observe the election.

Speaking to an American journalist, Borodin said the voting was more than fair. “It is only possible in the United States for the candidate who gets the most votes not to win,” he joked.

In an interview Sunday evening, Lukashenko’s predecessor as president, Stanislav S. Shushkevich, said that almost every prominent Russian politician has backed Lukashenko. He accused the Russians of having a “colonial” mentality toward Belarus.

“If Russia and the Russian authorities only applied the same level of human rights and democracy to Belarus as they do in Russia, we would have no problem whatsoever,” Shushkevich said.

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.