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Europe, U.S. plan sanctions against Belarus
Associated Press
Published March 25, 2006
MINSK, Belarus - The opposition promised to go ahead with a rally today, even though a police raid on its tent camp showed the regime is not relaxing its hard line against dissent. The United States and European Union said they will impose sanctions on President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.
Riot police broke up the camp on Minsk's main square before dawn Friday, arresting hundreds of demonstrators who had been part of unprecedented round-the-clock protests in this tightly controlled former Soviet state. Protesters were loaded on to trucks and taken to jail; some who escaped or were freed said they were beaten by police.
A former Polish ambassador to Belarus, Mariusz Maszkiewicz, was among those arrested and said he and others in the same police truck were severely beaten, Polish Embassy spokeswoman Monika Sadkowska said.
Opposition supporters holding flowers returned to Oktyabrskaya Square at twilight Friday, but police seized some of them, pushed the rest of the small crowd down the street and prevented pedestrians on their way home from work from walking through the square.
The European Union and the United States called Friday for an immediate end to the crackdown on opposition activists, who are protesting Lukashenko's overwhelming victory in last weekend's presidential election as fraudulent.
EU leaders said the bloc would take "restrictive measures" against Lukashenko, including a likely travel ban to its member nations and a possible freeze of Belarussian assets in Europe. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Washington would act in unison with the EU on such measures.
But those measures seemed unlikely to influence Lukashenko, who despises the West and is pushing for a closer union of Belarus and Russia.
In Moscow, Russia's foreign minister took issue with media description of police storming the tent camp.
"I would not call the scenes I saw on TV today the use of force," Sergey Lavrov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
The tough response, after days of allowing demonstrations, indicated police have no intention of allowing today's gathering. Opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich has said he plans to unveil a strategy to drive forward the call for new elections without Lukashenko's participation.
[Last modified March 25, 2006, 01:51:17]
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