Life Imitates Art -Vendetta in Belarus

By STEVE GUTTERMAN, Associated Press Writer

MINSK, Belarus - Riot police clashed with protesters in the Belarusian capital Saturday, forcing demonstrators back and hitting several with truncheons. Four explosions were heard, apparently percussion grenades set off by police.

The clash broke out after a line of riot police blocked the path of hundreds of protesters heading to a jail where demonstrators arrested in previous protests were being held. Police beat their shields with truncheons and advanced on the crowd.

The protesters began to disperse, yelling: "Fascists!" But police detained some 20 people and loaded them into large trucks.

At least two people were seen lying on the ground after the clash, apparently seriously hurt. An ambulance came to pick up the injured.

The main opposition candidate in the vote, Alexander Milinkevich, denied media reports that he himself was detained.

He told The Associated Press that his spokesman, Pavel Mazheika, was detained in a separate incident. Milinkevich went to a precinct house to attempt to secure his release.

"No, I have not been detained," he said. "I came to the (police precinct house) to help my press secretary, who was carrying equipment and was detained," he said.

However, Alexander Kozulin, an opposition leader who called on protesters to head to the jail after the rally, was beaten and detained during the clash, his spokeswoman, Nina Shidlovskaya said.

The violence came after an opposition rally drew thousands of Belarusians peacefully in a park to denounce President Alexander Lukashenko after a disputed election returned him to power.

Rows of black-clad police blocked the central October Square where opposition leaders had called for a rally at noon, pushing crowds back in a bid to end a week of unprecedented protests in the tightly controlled former Soviet republic. Demonstrators shouted "Shame!" and "Long live Belarus!"

Tensions mounted swiftly as police in full riot gear arrived by the busload to shove protesters back. The crowd at a major intersection near the square — where Lenin Street meets Independence Avenue — quickly swelled from a few hundred to some 3,000.

After gathering on the other side of the sprawling square with a crowd of about the same size, Milinkevich led supporters to a nearby park and the group swelled to as many as 5,000 people.

"The authorities can only confront the striving of the people for change with persecution and violence," Milinkevich told the crowd. Demonstrators held flowers and waved the red-and-white historic flag of the opposition.

"The people have come out today, they have come out in the face of truncheons, in the face of arrests. We are working against dictatorship," Milinkevich said. "The more the authorities conduct repression, the closer they bring themselves to their end." . . .

leave your fear behind

you are the revolution you've been waiting for

We look with the eyes of the ancestors

Before Mindscape there was Wilderness . In the unpublished first volume of a projected trilogy, Andrea Hairston created the future world she describes in Mindscape and the people who inhabit it. That material forms the backstory to the present work, and other characters from the first book are represented by chapter-heading epigraphs. They include Lawanda Kitt's equally Ebonic sister, Geraldine, and an Ouagadougouan philosopher of the past, Vera Xa Lalafia. Their writings, imagined by Hairston, constitute the cultural ethos of this fictional world and add up to Hairston's personal credo. Here's a sample:

"The stories we tell, tell us."

-- Geraldine Kitt, Junk Bonds of the Mind

"You see what you think you see. You find what you look for. If you can't imagine it, it won't happen for you. Imagine the impossible, imagine the spirit of your enemies, imagine miracles, imagine the last moment of your life, imagine eternity. Imagine what you can't imagine."

-- Vera Xa Lalafia, Healer Cosmology, The Final Lessons

"We have to time travel. Change the past with the actions we take now. Rehearse the future. Live each moment like it's forever." -- Celestina Xa Irawo, Preamble to the Interzonal Peace Treaty

"If everybody is the same, nobody is anything."

-- Vera Xa Lalafia, Healer Cosmology, The Final Lessons

""Survival of the fittest' be the sort of raunchy, take-no-prisoners metaphor that folk throw 'round to make the universe seem like some sorta competitive meritocracy where the best and brightest get all the props and jacked-up failures get dusted (it's they own fault too). What universe is this? Darwin oughta be hollerin' in his grave."

-- Geraldine Kitt, Junk Bonds of the Mind

"In a world of monsters and everyday horror, you want to give a card-carrying scumbag a medal for just being a decent guy once in his life. I suggest waiting until he at least makes it a habit."

-- Tadeshi Mifune, Surviving the Future, Last Minute Notes

"No meaning without experience, no future in advance of living it, no absolute, eternal truth revealed either by God or mathematical logic. The infinite cannot be reduced to a finite algorithm, poetic fantasy, or prophetic Vision. The map of the Universe is the Universe."

-- Vera Xa Lalafia, Healer Cosmology, The Final Lessons

"We are not a chosen people nor have we been abandoned, we are just unfinished. Past glory inspires us, yet nothing works the imagination like terror, except perhaps hope."

-- Celestina Xa Irawo, Preamble to the Interzonal Peace Treaty

"You understand the truth you grasp but not the truth that grasps you."

-- Vera Xa Lalafia, Healer Cosmology, The Final Lessons

"We done let the poetic spirit in folk languish, like bein' human mean togglin' a damn switch steada imaginin' yourself 'cross spacetime and back. ... The square root of bullshit is bullshit."

-- Geraldine Kitt, Junk Bonds of the Mind

"Anything that we are absolutely certain of doesn't matter and everything that truly matters is uncertain."

-- Vera Xa Lalafia, Healer Cosmology, The Final Lessons

"People be past masters at imaginin' the end of the world. . . doom and gloom in the twilight of the Gods--but folk're hard put to imagine a new day where we get on with each other, where we tear it up but keep it real. Why is that? Is an ole question, but I gotta keep askin'."

-- Geraldine Kitt, Junk Bonds of the Mind

"There aren't singular atoms, lonely souls, or Final Lessons. You're never done. Everything stretches beyond you. Who knows what will be true tomorrow? We look with the eyes of the ancestors into the faces of our children."

-- Vera Xa Lalafia, Healer Cosmology, The Final Lessons

The Valley Advocate, March 9, 2006

Modern Conveniences

Yes, we blow our noses and wipe our asses with old growth forests - how symbolic.



"Intact areas of northern Ontario’s Kenogami forest have been untouched since the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago -- but clearcut logging to feed paper industry demand is threatening this ancient boreal forest."

Here's the NRDC response.