BELARUS: Parliament Close To Being Crushed By Lukashenko Steamroller

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jana Skadlova and Sergei Strokan

MINSK/MOSCOW, Nov 26 1996 (IPS) - Belarussian opposition hopes of saving their parliament from president Alexander Lukashenko’s steamroller bid to assume near-total power appeared to have foundered in the wake of his ‘success’ in a much discredited weekend referendum.

About 110 of 199 members of parliament, loyal to Lukashenko set up a breakaway parliament in Minsk Tuesday in direct opposition to the existing house. But when opposition deputies convened an emergency session of the original parliament fewer than 70 members were able to turn up, failing to muster a quorum.

The new rival ‘parliament’ — dubbed a ‘deputies’ meeting’ by vice- speaker Yuri Malumov, met behind closed doors but pledged support for Lukashenko’s takeover. Meanwhile the opposition National Accord parliamentary bloc renewed efforts to impeach the president for violating the constitution begun before Sunday’s referendum.

Lukashenko says Sunday’s absolute majority of 70.5 percent of all voters in a 84 percent turnout clearly backed his planned new constitution — and gave him the right to disband parliament.

“No one has read the constitution here,” Irina Khalip, deputy editor-in-chief of the Belarus daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta told IPS in Minsk. “Most people don’t care about the constitution. It was not an issue in the referendum. Lukashenko has made this a vote of confidence in his rule.

“And because simple people like his simple politics, he won it”.

“The calmness on the street of Minsk is deceiving,” warned Yevgeni Pakhomov, an Belarus expert with Itogi magazine in Moscow. “Both sides of the conflict are not going to give in. While Lukashenko has police and tanks, the parliament still has the vociferous National Accord behind it.

“The still-powerful Communin the opposition side too. Everybody is afraid the situation will develop as in Moscow in 1993 sian president Boris) Yeltsin’s tanks ended up firing on parliament.”

Western officials quicials queued up to stand behind the National Accord’s insistence that the referendum was riddled by fraud, charges that ran free even before the first ballot was cast.

Before the vot was cast.

Before the vote Lukashenko fired the head of the national Central Election Commitor Gonchar in defiance of the will of parliament. Gonchar says he was fired after he refused a bribe and then an order to agree the result in advance.

“I personally was offered 500,000 U.S. dollars by the presidential administration to “correctly” supervise the proceedings, but refused and was fired. We also know that thousands unregistered ballots were printed by the government.

“I would not sign the results as whatever they were going to be they would be falsified,” Gid.

The government made full use of its total control over TV and radio, banning opposition representatives throughout the pre-vote period. Opposition newspapers, banned from printing on the state- owned presses in Belin neighbin neighbouring Lithuania instead, only to be seized at the border.

“How can we talk about the freedom of choice, if the Supreme Soviet was not given one minute on TV to explain its questions on the ballot?” Gonchar said.

The National Accord say the authorities abused a provision in the law that allows early voting for citizens unable to cast ballots on Sunday. An extraordinary 15 percennary 15 percent of the electorate supposedly voted this way. With Gonchar out of the way, Lukashe the Ce the Central Electoral Commission headquarters with olice units throughout the process, banning opposition figures and even parliamentary deputies from the building.

“I will not allow parliament to work against the will of the president and of the people after such an overwhelming vote,” he said in an address to journalists in Minsk. “Only 7.9 percent of the voters supported the rival constitution offered up by a group of parliamentarians, which would have done away with the post of president,” Lukashenko said.

“The new constitution is not for Lukashenko or the parliament. It is needed to make Belarus a truly democratic state, such democracy being ensured by order and discipline”.

The U.S. State Department has led foreign criticism. “We’re quite disappointed that in Belarus yesterday (Sunday) the government went ahead with this referendum that has been labee Organisation for Security a in Europe and other international organisations as deprived of legitimacy,” said State Department spokesman Glyn Davies in Washington.

While both sides claim they fight for democracy, the real issue in Belarus is the distribution of power, experts say.

The crisis began ea say.

The crisis began earlier this year when Lukashenko proposed a national ballot on the new constitution, which would extend his term in office from five to seven years an bicameral parliament with the president directly appointing a third of the deputies in the upper house. According to this draft constitution, the regional governors, already appointed by the president, would name another third of the deputies.

He also proposed the creation of a new constitutional court bench, of which the president would appoints half the judges including the chairman. A Council of Europe analysis said that Lukashenko’s powers under his proposed constitution “could not be stronger.”

A stunned parliament countered by insisting on questions of its own to add to the ballot, seeking the right to abolish the presidency, to deepen parliamentary powers through constitutional reform, for the direct election of regional governors directly, and give the parliament control over the national budget.

But the real battle started in November when the president insisted that the result of the vote be binding on all. This the parliament rejected, as did the Belarussian constitutional court. The parliament also began impeachment proceedings against Lukashenko.

Gonchar accused Lukashenko of a “sick lust for power”, which, called “the main source of tension in society”.

“The only power who can defuse the crisis is Russia,” said Dmitry Ruyrikov, Yeltsin’s adviser on foreign affairs, in Moscow. “Belarussian stability will depend on tsian stability will depend on the speed and depth of its integration with Russia. But that speed and depth is lacking at the moment.”

The Kremlin briefly intervened last week to broker a short- lived compromise between Lukashenko and the National Accord but the deal collapsed within a day.

The events in Belarus pose a delicate problem for the Kremlin. Many of the opposition leaders are also nationalist critics of Lukashenko’s efforts to re-link the former Soviet republic of Belarus with the Russian Federation.

There are many in Moscow who see closer links with Belarus as desirable, even though there are as many who fear that the failing Belarussian economy will only prove a weighty liability to Russia’s own economic development. At the same time there are many in Minsk who suspect the Kremlin’s motives in responding to the crisis.

Moscow has also got to been seen to distance itself from what it and other foreign states understand to be Lukashenko’s clearly constitutionally illegal activity.

“The Russian executive is splitting on the problem,” says Irina Siluyanova, a senior researcher with the Moscow-based International Economic and Political Studies Institute. “The presidential administration is far more supportive of Lukashenko than the cabinet of (prime minister) Viktor Chernomyrdin.

“The (presidential) executive operates from a geopolitical view, seeing Belarus as a safe buffer zone against the eastward expansion of NATO. But it cannot openly support Lukashenko because his human rights record affects the Russian image abroad.”

“At the same time the government is doing little to initiate integration, because Belarus’ economic performance has been very poor.”

“But if there is bloodshed, Russia will certainly intervene.”