As you might have noticed, I’ve had a few posts on the situation in Belarus, the last outwardly communist and dictatorial state in Europe.

This month, on the 19th, there will be an ‘election’ in Belarus. The election will not be free and will not be fair. If there are protests following the elections I imagine that many of the protesters will be killed. You see, security forces in Belarus many not refuse any order, even if it is unlawful, at least according to a ‘law’ enacted by the current ‘president’ Alexander Lukashenko.

Here is a little bit of background.

From The Hill:

McCotter commits fashion crime in Speaker’s Lobby

It may not be the worst fashion faux pas in the world, but Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) broke the dress code last week by appearing in the Speaker’s Lobby and on the House floor in denim. McCotter is a repeat offender, according to a Capitol employee, as is Rep. Butch Otter (R-Idaho).

…

But McCotter spokesman Bob Jackson maintains that wearing jeans was appropriate considering what else the congressman was doing that day. Jackson explained that McCotter was taking part in a friendly protest called the —Blue Jean Revolution— at the Belarus Embassy near Dupont Circle in support of the pro-Democracy movement in Belarus.

—What happened was he was scheduled to appear at 11 a.m. and then was called for the vote, so he zipped straight over to the vote,— he said. —I know the fashion police probably frowned upon it, but the congressman was expressing support for freedom in Belarus.—

From the NY Times as reprinted by Data —“ The Independent Belarusian Web-site:

Bringing Down Europe’s Last Ex-Soviet Dictator

On March 19, Aleksandr Milinkevich will not be elected the next president of Belarus. He campaigns anyway, but with something else in mind. Through the winter he has traveled from city to city in clattering rented vans, meeting would-be voters in the bleak cold, gathering signatures and speaking about the social, economic and, above all, political neuroses that afflict this small nation at the eastern edge of a new Europe. “I am Aleksandr Milinkevich,” he recently assured a worker outside an auto-parts factory in Borisov, a gritty industrial city northeast of the capital, Minsk. The man seemed genuinely stunned to find this stranger greeting him.

Members of the opposition group Zubr distribute strips of blue jeans, their symbol of resistance.

“It is impossible to win at the elections, because there are no elections,” Milinkevich told me the first time I met him in a dim, three-room apartment in Minsk in October. “Nobody counts the votes.” It was my first realization that a presidential campaign in Belarus, a former republic of the Soviet Union, operates with a logic outside any traditional notion of democracy.

…

Lukashenko is prepared for unrest. Last year he eliminated a legal provision that allowed members of the police force and security services to disobey what they considered an unlawful order. A new law pushed through Parliament late last year makes organizing a public protest – or making statements that discredit the state – punishable by three to five years in prison. Lukashenko’s interior minister recently ordered new measures to increase security before the election. A European diplomat told me that if Milinkevich’s supporters gather in numbers in Minsk to protest an electoral result that is already a foregone conclusion, Lukashenko will not hesitate to disperse them forcefully. “There is no doubt Lukashenko will issue the order,” he said.

…

Zubr’s newest project is to organize protests on the 16th of each month. The date commemorates the night – Sept. 16, 1999 – that Viktor Gonchar, once a deputy prime minister and election commissioner who became a popular opposition leader poised to challenge Lukashenko, disappeared along with a businessman who financed the opposition. On that night the two men went to a banya, the public bathhouse that is a ritual part of Slavic life. They were evidently abducted and probably murdered. The idea is to remind Belarussians of the darker episodes in Lukashenko’s rule.

Please join with me in prayer for those fighting for freedom.