Statkevich and Uss met with electorate in Baranavichy (Photo)

They were given the biggest hall in the city –House of Culture of the town.

Presidential candidates Mikalai Statkevich and Dzmitry Uss arranged their meeting with the electorate in Baranavichy on December, 2 , “Radio Svaboda” reports.

The hall has 500 seats, but only about 100 voters came to the meeting with candidates for presidency. Possibly, the reason was, as local citizens explained, that city election committee had placed the information about the meeting rather late, and that the place of the meeting was changed suddenly at the last moment.

In his welcome speech candidate Mikalai Statkevich stated, that the city of Baranavichy is for him his second motherland. Here his father lives, here his mother is buried, and right here he himself was working and serving his sentence on the so-called “chemistry” for more than a year. Statkevich said that Belarus is still an outlaw country in Europe, as there haven’t been any free elections here since 1995, there’s no freedom of speech here, no freedom of mass media. He dwelled on the issue of falsification on Belarusian elections, and on the way it’s done, how votes are calculated, and, as to him, it’s done even worse than in some African countries where votes are nevertheless calculated.

The candidate Dzmitry Uss in his welcome speech stated that he went into politics after the situation when he as a businessman came across problems with the acting government, and when the authorities hadn’t registered him to participate in the elections into “the house of representatives” and Minsk City Council.

Whether by accident or not, but right on the day when Statkevich and Uss arrived, the authorities had arranged a festival near the House of culture – the opening of the town New Year’s tree. Before Statkevich and Uss the town of Baranavichy was already visited by the candidates Andrei Sannikov, Ryhor Kastusyou, Yaraslau Ramanchuk, and on December, 9 the visit of Uladzimir Nyaklyaeu is expected.