With the opposition disputing President Alexander Lukashenko's landslide victory in Sunday's vote, Vladimir Rushailo, the head of the poll's monitoring mission from the Commonwealth of Independent States, said, "The opposition has absolutely no moral right to talk about mass ballot rigging or that we do not recognize the election results."
The former Russian interior minister, who is also the chairman of the influential CIS Executive Committee, said he had met with the leading opposition runner in the election, Alexander Milinkevich, and had great respect for him as a presidential candidate.
But he dismissed a protest currently being staged by about 300 people on the capital's main square.
"As far as the tent camp is concerned, we have seen it all before and know who stands behind this," said Rushailo, in a thinly veiled swipe at foreign governments, who many Russian politicians suspect of financing the mass demonstrations in Ukraine and Georgia that followed presidential elections there and led to a pro-Western change in power.
He said that the protesters in Minsk constituted "a tiny fraction of the total electorate."
The chairman of the CIS Executive Committee also said that any violations that had occurred during the election were purely technical.
Lukashenko, dubbed "Europe's last dictator" by Washington, was re-elected for a third five-year term with 82.6% of the vote in Sunday's election. Milinkevich was a distant second with 6%, while Liberal Democratic leader Sergei Gaidukevich garnered 3.5%, and Alexander Kozulin, the leader of the Social-Democratic Party, took 2.3%. Turnout was officially 92.6%.
Russia and the CIS have recognized the elections. The United States and the European Union have called for a re-run and said they are considering imposing sanctions against Belarus.
