CONGRATULATIONS to President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. He received over 80 per cent of the vote in the Belarus presidential election and saw off the western imperialist-backed challenger Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – who received just 9.9 per cent.
Lukashenko has commented on the large-scale street protests that took place in the Belarusian capital immediately after the polling finished, stating that he would not allow a Ukraine-style ‘Maidan revolution’ to take place in the country.
‘Everything I was talking about is being confirmed. If someone didn’t believe it – they believe it now … I had warned: there will be no Maidan, no matter how much someone might want it.
‘Therefore everyone needs to settle down and calm down,’ Lukashenko said, speaking to journalists on Monday.
By speaking about ‘Maidan’ he was referring to the counter-revolution organised in the Ukraine by the EU and the US, when they both decided to push eastwards.
Large-scale fascist forces were brought onto the streets in a violent coup that overthrew the then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Since the coup, a ruthless civil war has been conducted against workers in the East of the country, while Crimea has broken away from the Ukraine and joined Russia.
The signal to begin to push eastwards was given after Yanukovych’s decision to not sign an Association Agreement with the European Union in late 2013.
A mass wave of protests across the Ukraine culminated in the very violent February 2014 coup.
Following the transition of power, Kiev forces launched military operations against those who refused to recognise the legitimacy of the new government.
During the Ukrainian conflict, Washington and its NATO allies worked directly with right-wing Ukrainian fascist groups, including the neo-Nazi-inspired Right Sector militia.
According to President Lukashenko, over two dozen members of law enforcement suffered serious injuries during Sunday night’s protests by the ‘democrats’.
‘There are broken arms and legs. They deliberately targeted them. They fought back. Why cry about it now? The response will be adequate.
‘We will not allow the country to be torn apart,’ he said.
According to Belarusian Internal Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Olga Chemodanova, protesters lit flares, threw nails and barbs onto roads, attempted to build makeshift barricades, dismantled parts of sidewalks and threw paving stones at police.
One group of protesters in the city of Pinsk reportedly wielded sharpened poles and stones to attack police.
Criminal proceedings have been launched against persons accused of violent behaviour.
Chemodanova stressed that lethal weapons were not used by police in their response, and described earlier reports of a fatality among protesters as ‘nothing but fake news’.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev have all congratulated Lukashenko on his re-election, with Sergei Lebedev, chair of the Commonwealth of Independent States mission in Belarus, saying there were no issues which could call the legitimacy of the vote into question.
Tikhanovskaya’s campaign said their candidate did not recognise the results, and is demanding a ‘peaceful’ transfer of power.
The attempt to overthrow Lukashenko is an attempt to further weaken Russia, in a situation where a massive crisis of the capitalist system is forcing the ruling classes of the US, EU and the UK to consider that the solution to their crisis is another drive to the East and restoring capitalism first in Belarus and then in Russia.
The News Line urges the working class of the West to fight this imperialist drive to a new war to relieve the greatest-ever crisis of capitalism.
The best way for the workers of the world to defend Belarus, Russia and China, is to overthrow the ruling classes that are presiding over the greatest crisis of capitalism ever, and create the conditions whereby the workers of Russia, Belarus and China can restore rule through workers’ soviets without risking the kind of imperialist intervention that we have seen in the Ukraine and now Belarus.
