Belarus will be free

Despite a crackdown against demonstrators earlier this week, several thousand pro-democracy marchers took to the streets today:

Riot police armed with clubs clashed with a crowd of protesters demonstrating Saturday against the disputed election that returned Belarus’ hard-line President Alexander Lukashenko to power.

The violence erupted when a gauntlet of black-clad officers blocked a march on a jail holding demonstrators arrested at previous protests over the March 19 presidential elechouted “Shame!” and “Long l ive Belarus!”

On the other side of the huge square, the main opposition candidate in last week’s election, Alexander Milinkevich, led a separate crowd away to a nearby park, where he announced “the creation of a movement for the liberation of Belarus.”

“The authorities can only confront the striving of the people for change with persecution and violence,” Milinkevich told the crowd, which grew to as many as 7,000 people.
[...]
...while he praised those who have protested the election, he acknowledged their numbers are not enough to defeat Lukashenko’s government.

“We can be proud of what we have already done: Fear is vanquished,” he said. “But today there are not 200,000 or 500,000 of us coming out into the square. If there were, they (the authorities) would run away from the country.”

“We are starting work against dictatorship, and this work will sooner or later bear its fruit,” he said.

Posted by damian at March 25, 2006 05:58 PM | TrackBack