Protest Takes Bloody Detour in Belarus

A rally billed as a last-ditch attempt to challenge a discredited presidential election in Belarus erupted in violence Saturday as riot police plunged into the crowd with truncheons and arrested dozens of people, including opposition candidate Alexander Kozulin.

As protesters, some of them bloodied, ran screaming from the scene, police chased organizers down side streets of the capital, Minsk, clubbing them to the ground once they were caught.

“Law enforcement took maximum security measures to prevent an escalation, and protected people who were simply trying to spend their leisure time nearby,” Interior Minister Vladimir Naumov said at a news conference later in the day.

He accused Kozulin, one of two opposition candidates who unsuccessfully challenged President Alexander G. Lukashenko in the March 19 election, of urging supporters to storm a jail where detained activists were being held and of calling “for the physical elimination of the head of state, and for a power grab.”

But Kozulin’s spokeswoman, Nina Shidlovskaya, said the protest was only intended as a peaceful show of support for the detainees.

Kozulin, a former university rector, stepped in front of the crowd to negotiate, “to try to explain why we were here, and that we didn’t mean any harm,” she said in a telephone interview. “But when he started walking toward them, the police began to beat their clubs against their shields, and they were advancing toward us like an iron-clad army.”

The protesters turned down another street, but were suddenly set upon by police who broke the crowd into sections of several dozen each and began beating protesters with clubs, Shidlovskaya said.

“People began to fall down with bloodied heads. It was a horrible scene. All I could see was clubs rising and falling on people’s heads. The street was filled with screams of pain,” she said. “I turned and saw Alexander [Kozulin], who had been all the time next to me. He was a few steps behind me, and a policeman was holding him with one hand and raising his club with the other hand over his head. That was the last time I saw him.”

Eight policemen were injured in the clashes, authorities said.

Lukashenko, a former collective farm manager who has been accused of manipulating elections to remain in power for the last 12 years, maintains a government-controlled economy and repressive security apparatus to run a country often seen as a relic of the Soviet era.

Relative prosperity and a wide social services network have assured Lukashenko’s popularity, but international observers found deep flaws in the voting that handed the president an 82.6% victory. They said harassment and arrests of opposition leaders and members of the independent media rendered the balloting undemocratic.

On Friday, the United States and the European Union said they would impose targeted travel restrictions and financial sanctions on Belarus.

In an interview with Kremlin political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky that aired on the Russian NTV network Saturday night, Lukashenko asserted that Belarus compared favorably with Western Europe.

“They say that Lukashenko is a bad one because he is taking a third term. But why is nobody saying that [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair is bad because he’s taking a third term?” Lukashenko said, speaking of himself in the third person. “They say France has such a democratic society, but then we saw Paris on fire. What kind of democracy is this?”

“Everyone lives together amicably here,” he said, adding that the West was unhappy because he had frustrated plans to extend the reach of institutions such as the EU and NATO into Belarus.

The rally, on the anniversary of the declaration of the first independent Belarusian state in 1918, began as a peaceful show of support for a new election.

When police quietly blocked access to Oktyabrskaya Square in the center of the city, the scene of major protests for several days last week, an estimated 5,000 people moved farther down the street to a nearby park. Demonstrators waved flags and chanted “We are not afraid!”

Another opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, who won 6% of the vote in the official count, announced the creation of a broad-based new civil rights movement: Truth, Justice and Freedom.

After about three hours, Kozulin, who drew about 2% of the vote, called on about 1,000 supporters to march toward the detention center. Shidlovskaya, his spokeswoman, said the plan was to “express solidarity with our comrades who were arrested” during the forced closure early Friday of an opposition tent camp in Oktyabrskaya Square.

Milinkevich was furious, saying Kozulin’s move helped turn the peaceful protest into a violent debacle.

“We were resolutely against it. We knew it would provoke the authorities,” he said in a telephone interview from a police station where he was seeking the release of his press secretary.

“We didn’t want to offer the authorities another chance to show their cruel face, and we wanted people to go home,” he said. “It was a bloody, violent scene, and that’s exactly what the authorities wanted. Now they’re going to portray us all over television as terrorists.... But it was not a fight. Peaceful, unarmed people were beaten up by heavily armed police.”

He said the arrests numbered in the hundreds. Authorities declined to give a number.

Milinkevich said opposition leaders were not planning more rallies during the next 30 days.

“Some people think I should hide, that the authorities may be looking for me to arrest me,” he said. “But if they want to arrest me, I have no place to hide. I’m certainly not leaving the country, not now, not ever.”

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko in Moscow contributed to this report.