Valer Ukhnalou: “Boycott has no advantages”
- 14.05.2008, 16:18
Coordinator of Charter’97 Zmitser Bandarenka and the Young Front organisation said boycott of the parliamentary “elections” was necessary. Valer Ukhnalou, secretary of the Central Committee of the Belarusian Communist Party, spoke about advantages and disadvantages of the possible boycott in an interview to “Tovarishch” newspaper.
– Speaking about a boycott in the situation of the Republic of Belarus is ridiculous. Boycott has no advantages. If the democratic forces don’t run in the elections, there are no reasons to talk that election are rigged, deputies are not elected but appointed. The authorities will carry out the campaign. They won’t need to falsify anything. We will have in the country, what we have now.
If the democratic forces run in the elections, we make the authorities to violate the law: do not include representatives of the United Democratic Forces (UDF) into electoral commissions, do not register our candidates, forbid meetings with electorate, do not print our propaganda materials... Then we will get the right to speak about rigging of results of voting. And about rigging of the elections in general.
The second problem is rather more important. In case of boycott the opposition loses every opportunity to work with electorate. If there were an opportunity to hold the boycott as a campaign, which is more difficult than an election campaign, in this case it would be possible to talk about good and harm of boycott. But boycott is forbidden by law in Belarus. In our conditions, boycott will mean that no one will do anything.
The forces that have no structures, don’t feel support of the electorate stand for boycott. It is they who say: we need to boycott the elections. It is unacceptable for the united democratic forces.
The UDF political council decided in March: following the course of the election campaign, taking into account the degree of transparency or vote fraud, the democratic forces will reserve the right to take retaliatory steps, including withdrawal of democratic candidates from the election campaign.
We should press on the authorities right now and during the lection campaign to gain relatively free elections; we should gain an opportunity to work legally with electorate. If 110 UDF candidates print and spread their programmes, it will give a serious result.
One can come to power only with the help of elections. It’s impossible to gain support of electorate without winning struggle for people’s mind. Yes, we understand: it will be extremely hard to win in these cruel conditions, in the conditions of harsh authoritarianism. Even under dictatorship in Zimbabwe, where shooting people was common practice, the opposition managed to come to power, and won through the elections.
Comment of www.charter97.org: We remind our readers that a session of the Belarusian Communist Party (BCP) was held on 3 December 2006. The forum, where more than 250 delegates were present, recommended all BCP candidates for deputies of local councils to withdraw their candidatures.
“Taking into account Lukashenka’s statement “the presidential deflections have been fraud” and taking into account that our representatives are not included into electoral commissions, the session recommended not to run in the local elections,” Syarhei Vaznyak, member of the PKB Central Committee, told in an interview to Radio Svaboda.
This decision was taken by the BCP session a month before the local “elections,” held on 14 January 2007.