BELARUS' CONFLICT WITH INTERNATIONAL OBSERVERS GOING ON

Five ODIHR observers arrived in Minsk on the afternoon of August 17, while two members of the team stayed behind because they were still unable to obtain Belarusian visas. The two observers, a British and a U.S. nationals, were members of the ODIHR Technical Assessment Mission, which was deployed in Belarus during the October 2000 parliamentary elections.

Aleksandr Lukashenko's campaign manager Nikolai Cherginets, a member of the upper chamber of parliament, condemned the international institutions' attitude during the last year's parliament elections. "The ODIHR and OSCE received invitations but treated our sovereign state like an animal farm," he told reporters on August 13 speaking at the Central Election Commission.

The Belarusian authorities traditionally tried to find someone to blame. On August 16, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry made a statement urging the United States and the European Union member states not to interfere in the election process in the Republic of Belarus. "Guided by its intention to conduct the forthcoming presidential election in a democratic, fair and transparent manner," the Belarusian government has invited representatives of OSCE countries, the OSCE ODIHR, the European Parliament, and the Parliamentary Assemblies of the OSCE and the Council of Europe, the statement says. "Again, like during the 2000 parliamentary election campaign, the Government of the Republic of Belarus thereby displays its open approach to the conduct of the presidential election and to the presence of foreign observers, and in this regard condemns statements by the US Department of State and a number of European institutions with respect to the Belarusian authorities, [alleged] interest in the falsification of the election results."

"The Government of the Republic of Belarus emphasizes the fact that in violation of existing documents, in 2000, the OSCE ODIHR refused to participate in the full-scale observation of parliamentary elections in Belarus, which is a member of this organization," the statement says. "However, that did not prevent the OSCE ODIHR from drawing a disputable conclusion that the election results should not be recognized. The Belarusian side regards such an approach as politically motivated. It shows that the OSCE ODIHR is not free in making its own decisions. It is a dangerous precedent for the OSCE that its authorized institution, avoiding the observation of elections despite existing documents, assumes the right to comment on their results," the statement says. "In these conditions, the Government of the Republic of Belarus expresses doubt about the objectivity of the OSCE ODIHR's position during the present presidential election."

The Belarusian authorities seem to cherish no illusions about the international observers' conclusions with regard to the presidential election. They have been trying to intimidate the observers or to picture them as biased in the eyes of Belarusian voters. They have used any means to delay the observers' coming to Belarus, so that to have an opportunity later to challenge their ability to objectively assess the situation in such a short term. It is evident that within several days that the observers will spend in Belarus they will have fewer chances to observe electoral violations. They have not, for instance, observed the flaws in the formation of election commissions. As a result, the authorities' critics were barred the way to the commissions. The ODIHR experts have also not personally witnessed the controversy concerning ballot-access signatures. Contesting the CEC conclusions, some of the former presidential bidders, including ex-ambassador to Latvia, Estonia and Finland Mikhail Marinich and former head of Lukashenko's Presidential Administration Leonid Sinitsyn, claim they have filed more than 100,000 voter signatures required to get them on the ballot.

As the day of the first election round on September 9 approaches, the situation in the country becomes charged. The Belarusian authorities, for instance, have recently launched an attack against Belarusian NGOs. Under various pretexts, the police raid NGO offices, making probes in their activities and seizing computers and other equipment. So the international observers will have enough to see in Belarus.