BELARUSAN OPPOSITION NOMINATES PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES DESPITE REPRESSION.

The leadership of the forcibly dissolved, but internationally recognized Belarusan parliament has empanelled an electoral commission, appointed Viktar Hanchar as its chairman and mandated it to conduct a presidential election this coming May. Hanchar had chaired the country’s official Central Electoral Commission prior to President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s 1996 coup. The opposition’s move to call the election conforms to the pre-1996 constitution, under which Lukashenka’s powers expire in June 1999. Lukashenka’s 1996 constitution, however, prolonged his term of office until 2001.

Yesterday the commission–which held its session in a private bus to avoid detection–managed to register two presidential candidates for the May balloting. One is former Prime Minister Mikhail Chyhir, who resigned from that post in 1996 as a protest against Lukashenka’s coup. The other is Zyanon Paznyak, the founding chairman of the Popular Front, who has lived in the United States and Poland since 1996. Other candidates may yet register. Hanchar and Chyhir said that “only mass repression” could possibly stop either the commission from organizing the balloting or the candidates from campaigning.

Just hours after the session, the authorities arrested and sentenced most of the commission’s sixteen members to brief detention terms or heavy fines. Hanchar was dragged out of his car by the police in downtown Minsk and hauled directly to prison for a ten-day term. The Lenin district court acted under a Soviet-era accelerated procedure often used against political dissidents. The charge against the commission’s members was “unauthorized assembly” (AP, RTR, Itar-Tass, March 1).

ABKHAZIA STARTS TOKEN READMISSION OF GEORGIAN REFUGEES.