Belarus President shuts down pro-democracy groups, instills climate of fear

In Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus, this was considered a threatening gathering.Two human-rights lawyers were making tea on an ancient gas stove while Zinaida Gonchar, the wife of a former opposition leader who disappeared without a trace almost five years ago, updated journalists about the search for her husband. "I still don't know what happened to him, and I don't know what to do about it," Ms. Gonchar said, her eyes glowing with deeply embedded anger. No one has seen or heard from Viktor Gonchar, a former chairman of the country's central election commission, since he and a friend were dragged off the streets of Minsk in September, 1999, two months after he declared that Mr. Lukashenko, the President, was illegally clinging to power. It was one of a spate of political "disappearances" that year. Sitting around the bare kitchen table, everyone in the room was aware that the KGB could bang on the door at any minute. The secret police keep an office in an apartment block directly across the courtyard from this tiny law office, which is disobeying a government order to stop its human-rights work.