KC: Moscow Prepares To Russian Spring As Thousands Protest Putin’s Election Fraud

Publication time: 5 December 2011, 23:33

Several thousand people turned out on this cold and rainy night to protest what observers and opposition leaders say were rigged parliamentary elections that gave a fraudulent victory to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his ruling United Russia party.

As an icy rain fell, an initial crowd of hundreds who gathered on a tree-lined boulevard for a sanctioned rally swelled to as many as 10,000, as chants of “Putin out!” and “Russia without Putin!” rang out.

The protest is thought to be the largest Russian opposition rally in years.

Widespread displeasure with Putin and his party has surrounded the December 4 poll, which the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said exhibited “limited political competition and a lack of fairness.”

The independent Golos election watchdog organization also said that it had received more than 1,500 complaints of electoral violations and been the subject of targeted harassment from government authorities.

Opposition leader Vladimir Ryzhkov, who spoke at the protest rally, said the official results could not be considered legitimate.

Vladimir Ryzhkov spoke at the opposition protest in central Moscow.

“About 10 to 15 percent of the votes were the result of ballot box stuffing, falsifications, and the rewriting of protocols. United Russia’s real result is no more than 35 percent, maybe even less than that,” he said.

“They have the most catastrophic situation in cities with a population of over one million: they got 20 to 25 percent there, at best. So, this is a failure,” Ryzhkov added.

Even with the claims of fraud, the more than 49 percent United Russia is said to have won represents a significant drop from the last election, when it claimed 64 percent of the vote.

This year, three parties split the remaining vote: A Just Russia, the Communist Party, and the Liberal Democratic Party.

Our correspondent reported seeing several thousand protesters crowded onto the boulevard that stretches away from Moscow’s Chistye Prudy metro, with some people climbing fences to better hear the speakers. Among those who rallied the crowd were the anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, writer and liberal Dmitry Bykov, Evgenya Chirikova from the Save Khimki Forest movement, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and Solidarity Youth head Ilya Yashin.

Nemtsov called the election “a crushing defeat for Putin and his party of swindlers and thieves,” and said there have been ‘thousands [of reports] of falsification facts, of ‘carousel’ voting, [and] stuffed ballot boxes.”

“We’re now starting a campaign to open a criminal case against these vermin. They stole 13 million votes from us. In Moscow they didn’t even get 25 percent but drew up 46 percent for themselves. Our observers across the whole country traced total violations. So [United Russia leaders] can conduct themselves however they like, but no one believes them at all.”

Among the protesters was Anna, a 22-year-old student, who told RFE/RL. “We came here because the results that they have given us are an insult and it’s an insult to us that our vote didn’t play a role.”

Twenty-eight-year-old Gennady, who works in marketing, said he came out to register his lack of faith in the election results.

“We decided to come here because we observed how things happening yesterday and last night, we watched all the videos on YouTube showing all this falsification and ballot stuffing, we’ve seen that there are pens at polling booths that have disappearing ink in them and all these things,” she said. “We asked our friends, our relatives and their friends who they voted for and none of them said United Russia — and still we get this fantastical result. We came here today to support people like us who don’t agree with this result.”

 

Police in riot gear detained an unknown number of protesters. At one point, hundreds of people who had begun marching toward the Central Elections Commission were stopped and taken away in buses.

Western correspondents reported seeing dozens of police buses and riot police in helmets and batons forcing apart protesters who had interlocked their arms.

Amnesty International issued a statement this evening criticizing what it said were at least 300 arrests made over the weekend and calling on authorities to release everyone in custody.

Nicola Duckworth, Director of Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Programme, said, “These disgraceful detentions highlight once again the failure of the Russian government to respect its citizens’ rights to freedom of expression and assembly.”

The election and protests come just three months before Russia votes for a new president, with Putin still the odds-on favorite to win.

Source: Agencies

Kavkaz Center

http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2011/12/05/15465.shtml

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