Tens of thousands rally in Ukraine to demand fair vote rerun

Updated 05:06am (Mla time) Dec 23, 2004
By Agence France-Presse
http://news.inq7.net/world/index.php?index=1&story_id=22099

Tens of thousands of supporters of Ukraine's opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko massed Wednesday in the center of the capital in a fresh show of force to press demands that a repeat presidential election be conducted fairly unlike a discredited poll last month.

"In the past 17 days, we have changed Ukraine peacefully, beautifully, elegantly and without a single drop of blood being shed," Yushchenko, flanked by family and well-known supporters including Ukraine's world heavyweight boxing champ Vitali Klitschko, said in an address to the crowd.

"We have two roads before us: one of corruption and humiliation ... the other, a wider one, the road of truth and justice. We have already set foot down this road," the opposition leader said before the crowd broke into thunderous chants of "Yu-shchen-ko! Yu-shchen-ko!"

The 50-year-old opposition leader, whose face was disfigured during the election campaign earlier this autumn by what experts have said was a poisoning, vowed to work to unite his country badly split over an earlier election ruled fraudulent and thrown out by the supreme court.

"I will be the president of all Ukraine. I will do everything for the unity of Ukraine," he said.

He repeated earlier pledges to pull Ukrainian troops out of Iraq if elected.

He also called on his supporters to return to the square on the day of the vote and remain there "until we celebrate our victory".

Giant television screens were set up on three sides of Kiev's Independence Square which was packed with tens of thousands of demonstrators facing a massive, rock-concert-like stage framed by towering loudspeakers set up on one side of a street that bisects the square.

"I came to defend freedom, to defend my right to choose," said 65-year-old pensioner Nikolai Shevchenko, one of the protesters who braved the freezing nighttime air to attend the rally. "This was a real revolution for real freedom."

Another pro-Yushchenko demonstrator, Tatiana Lysenko, a 45-year-old kindergarten teacher, predicted a victory for the opposition leader.

"If they don't falsify again, he will definitely win on Sunday. It was a revolution for justice, the people wanted to choose a president for a better life," she said.

The protest came four days before voters in this strategic nation of 48 million people return to the polls in a repeat of a presidential vote held November 21 and rekindled the political passions that resulted in the previous election being declared invalid by the supreme court due to fraud.

The rally also marked exactly one month since the start of mass street protests against the official results of the earlier vote which awarded victory to Yushchenko's pro-Moscow opponent, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, who was openly backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The rematch Sunday between Yushchenko and Yanukovich "will be a moment of truth for Ukraine," the opposition leader said.

Speaking to Ukrainian journalists Tuesday, Yushchenko sought to allay Moscow's concerns over the prospect that he will soon be running his country, but said that while Russia was of core interest to Ukraine he would nonetheless focus on building stronger bonds with western Europe.

"Emotion comes and goes. It is more important to understand one thing: Russia is of strategic interest to Ukraine. So we will always have a strategic policy and a political strategy in relations with Russia," Yushchenko said in remarks reported by Interfax.

He told state radio separately that, if elected, his first official visit would be to Russia. And he said the questions of whether to make Russian a second official language and to introduce dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship, both ideas backed by his rival, warranted discussion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who openly backed Yanukovich during the campaign, said Tuesday while on a visit to Germany that he would have "no problem" working with either Yushchenko or Yanukovich as Ukraine's leader.

The upcoming rerun election in Ukraine has assumed a major geopolitical significance as the country sits on the East-West fault line between former Soviet republics still dominated by Russia and long-established European and US democracies.

While Yushchenko is strongly backed by the West, and has vowed to build closer bonds between Ukraine and western Europe, Yanukovich favors maintaining deep historical and cultural bonds with Russia and he has as a result been supported by Moscow.

In neighboring Belarus, whose hardline regime also recognised Yanukovich's disputed victory, police on Wednesday detained some 100 independent observers hours before they were due to leave for Ukraine to monitor the presidential poll, human rights defenders said.

Ales Bialiatsky, head of the banned human rights group Viasna, told AFP that special forces detained the observers as they met in a hotel in the capital Minsk, officially to "check their identity documents".



©2004 www.inq7.net all rights reserved