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    March 06, 2012

Russian Opposition Calls for Civil Disobedience

   VOA News
   Opposition leader Alexei Navalny speaks to his supporters after being
   released from police custody after the massive rally at Pushkin Square
   protest in Moscow, Russia, March 5, 2012. Photo: AP
   Opposition leader Alexei Navalny speaks to his supporters after being
   released from police custody after the massive rally at Pushkin Square
   protest in Moscow, Russia, March 5, 2012.

   Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is promising a campaign of
   civil disobedience against what he says was a stolen president election
   by Vladimir Putin.
   Mass protesting
   Navalny says tens of thousands will turn out for street protests in
   Russian cities and will keep up the protests until their demands are
   met.
   Police arrested Navalny and hundreds of other opposition supporters at
   an anti-Putin rally in Moscow Monday. He was later released. Many of
   the protesters chanted "Russia without Putin" and "Power to millions,
   not to the police."
   At the same time, thousands of Putin supporters rallied and waved the
   Russian flag outside the Kremlin.
   Putin wins election
   Prime Minister Putin won Sunday's presidential election by a landslide.
   European observers say the election was clearly skewed in Putin's
   favor. They also report voting irregularities at one-third of the
   polling stations.
   Putin calls the election an "open and honest struggle."
   World leaders acknowledge Putin's victory with reservations. European
   Union foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton urged Russian leaders to
   address the "shortcomings" identified by international observers.
   The U.S. State Department congratulated the Russian people on the
   completion of the presidential poll and said it looks forward to
   working with the president-elect. But it also urged Moscow to launch an
   "independent and credible" investigation of all reported electoral
   violations.

   Observer assessment

   "What happened today, this experiment of [opposition leader Sergei]
   Udaltsov who tried to set up a tent camp, shows straight away that
   there are already hundreds of people who will stay until the very end.
   We will certainly stage mass protests, and thousands, tens of thousands
   people will come to the streets of Moscow and other cities and will
   refuse to leave. We will definitely do this, and we will be doing that
   until we win and achieve what we want,'' Navalny stated.

   "We would like to underline that, according to our assessment, these
   elections were unfair, despite some innovations in election process and
   unhindered possibilities for campaigning," said Tonino Picula, Head of
   OSCE Parliamentary Assembly Delegation and Former Croatian Foreign
   Minister: "We hope that the Russian authorities engage more
   energetically in complying with the OSCE commitments and expect that
   they will take these remarks as an incentive to engage in a process of
   electoral reform, thus allowing a genuine competition in future
   elections."
   "These elections were characterized by a number of the problems from
   the very beginning. The point of an election is that their outcome
   should be uncertain, this was not the case in Russia," Picula stated.

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