MINSK, Belarus — Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said yesterday that he won a mandate from voters to stay in power in a weekend referendum that scrapped presidential term limits, but foreign observers said the vote process was marred by violations, and thousands of people protested the outcome.
The Central Election Commission said 77 percent of voters supported the referendum scrapping a two-term limit on presidents. That allows the authoritarian president of this former Soviet republic to run again in 2006.
Mr. Lukashenko has led the nation since 1994.
Parliamentary elections for the largely powerless 110-seat House of Representatives were held alongside the referendum.
“People in Belarus once again said ’yes’ to our course,” said Mr. Lukashenko, whose crackdown on dissent, the independent press and the opposition has put his nation on an isolated, anti-Western path.
The referendum was seen as a critical test for Belarus to either move closer to the West or risk further alienation. The European Union and the United States had warned that a “yes” vote could push the country even further away from its European neighbors.
“We regret that Belarus missed an opportunity to take a step closer to the European family, where it belongs,” said Tone Tingsgaard, vice president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Separately, Belarusian authorities announced yesterday that an American citizen specializing in the Internet was arrested by the Belarus KGB, a security agency, on accusations that he mishandled funds.
The man, Ilya Mafter, a long-term employee of the Open Society Institute, founded by liberal financier George Soros, also was a consultant in Belarus for the United Nations Development Program, the U.N. agency said in New York.
In the parliamentary election, the opposition failed to win a single seat. But opposition leaders vowed to use widespread accusations of fraud to mobilize discontent in this nation of 10 million and called for more street protests.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the Belarusian people were kept from freely and fairly expressing their will.
“Electoral misconduct continued throughout the voting and vote-tabulation process,” he said.
Thousands of young Belarusians held a protest in a square near the presidential administration building last night, yelling, “Lukashenko lost.” The group later marched to the headquarters of the KGB.
The OSCE, which sent 270 observers to the parliamentary elections, said the vote “fell significantly short” of democratic standards.
Opposition leaders charged that authorities had arrested more than half of the 200 exit pollers from the independent Gallup Organization/Baltic Surveys.
That exit poll found that only 48.4 percent of 37,602 respondents said they voted to scrap presidential term limits, short of the simple majority needed for the measure to pass.
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