As President Basks, Foes Rally

A defiant Alexander Lukashenko, riding high on his victory in an election described as a farce by the secretary-general of the Council of Europe, declared Monday that “the revolution ... has failed,” even as thousands of citizens poured into the streets for a second night to demand new balloting.

“Despite a direct foreign dictate against us and colossal pressure from outside, they didn’t succeed in breaking us,” Lukashenko said in a nationally televised news conference, referring to his declared 82.6% victory in Sunday’s vote. “The Belarusian people are a nation that can’t be controlled.”

Opposition leaders said they would challenge the official results and called on the public to occupy the streets to demand a new election. Citizens began filing at dusk into Oktyabrskaya Square, but the numbers were only about half the 10,000 who protested on Sunday, election night.

Supporters of Alexander Milinkevich, the pro-Western physicist who is leading a coalition of six democratic parties, had said Monday that they would need “10 times” the number who turned out Sunday to break the resolve of the regime. The government already has arrested more than 400 opposition activists, closed down newspapers, levied heavy fines for insulting public officials and imposed lengthy sentences of internal exile on dissidents.

Hauling a large brass bell and a hefty sound system into the square, activists played protest songs and issued a resolution condemning the vote and demanding a new election July 16.

Midway through the evening, youths began setting up half a dozen small tents in the center of the square -- reminiscent of the tent cities that characterized the so-called Orange Revolution in neighboring Ukraine -- and announced their intention to remain until the election results were invalidated.

Not long after the tents began to go up, six police commandos evacuated and closed a nearby McDonald’s, one of the few refuges from the frigid night air. Trucks full of police and riot troops continued to wait nearby.

“We will stay here, and we hope that more and more people will come and protect us,” said Alexei Zelsky, a 23-year-old engineer, as thousands of cheering, flag-waving supporters chanted, “Long Live Belarus!” and “Shame!”

“We are tired of being scared,” he said.

Near the podium, 66-year-old Ivan Yatsina, a pensioner in a large fur hat and long, dark overcoat, had tears in his eyes as an old Belarusian folk song played and young people around him began singing, clutching hands and swaying.

“My heart aches for the Belarusian people, how they’ve been deceived, how they’ve been led by the nose,” Yatsina said. “These people are patriots. I’ve almost started crying here myself, but I want my Belarus to be happy, my children to be happy.”

Milinkevich pledged to stay with the crowd. “I’m not leaving the square,” he told the demonstrators. “It’s up to the young people. I will stay as long as they stay. It’s their initiative. No one is giving them orders.”

Earlier in the day, Milinkevich had denounced Lukashenko as an “illegitimate president.”

“We call on democratic countries to consider that the country is led by a man who has no right to be there,” he said.

Lukashenko’s victory won support from his chief ally, Russia. “The elections reflected high civic awareness and people’s wish for stability and more socially oriented policies,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Belarusians clearly expressed their will, and it must be respected.”

By contrast, Europe and the U.S., which poured millions of dollars into programs promoting democracy in Belarus, denounced the election results and the Bush administration joined the call for a new election.

The State Department said the U.S. was “preparing to take serious appropriate measures against those officials responsible for election fraud and other human rights abuses and will be coordinating these steps with the European Union.”

U.S. and European officials have talked about tightening visa bans on senior Belarusian figures and imposing economic sanctions, scenarios Lukashenko said he had already moved to circumvent by transferring export shipments to ports in Ukraine and Russia.

“We have already been living in isolation for quite a while,” he said during the news conference.

The Council of Europe’s secretary-general, Terry Davis, called Lukashenko “a president with a tainted mandate.”

“In a country in which freedom of expression and association are so thoroughly and aggressively suppressed, a vote is not an exercise in democracy, it is a farce,” he said in a statement.

Observers for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe documented widespread arrests of campaign workers and severe limits on access to the media, and said they found evidence of citizens being threatened with firing from state jobs or expulsion from universities as punishment for participating in the political process.

Their preliminary assessment says problems were found in 47% of the reports monitoring the vote count. The majority of observers were not permitted to stand close enough to see the marks on ballot papers, and there were “a number of instances” in which results were altered or filled in with pencil, it says.

Observers reported a series of identical signatures on the voter lists in 13% of the polling stations visited.

Supporters of the president say his convincing reelection reflects broad public backing for his record of achieving robust economic growth while maintaining state domination of the economy -- assuring stable jobs and social services -- and an independent foreign policy that refuses to be dictated to by the West.

In an address that was alternately triumphant, humorous, confrontational and bizarre, Lukashenko repeatedly gloated over the purported failure of Western attempts to undermine his regime and the inability of the opposition to muster more forces in the street.

“We gave [the opposition] the chance to express themselves 100%,” he said. “And if you are reasonable people, you became convinced that they are worth nothing.”

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.