
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 29, 1994                   TAG: 9401290032
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MINSK, BELARUS                                LENGTH: Medium

PARLIAMENT IN BELARUS ELECTS EX-COMMUNIST AS HEAD OF STATE

Two days after dumping its reform-minded head of state, the Belarus parliament on Friday elected a former Communist to replace him.

Mechislav Grib, until now head of parliament's Commission of National Security, Defense and Anti-Crime Struggle, replaces the ousted Stanislav Shushkevich.

Grib, 57, won on a 183-55 vote, receiving nine more votes than required. His formal title is chairman of the Belarussian Supreme Soviet, or parliament, which makes him head of state under the constitution.

Reformers warn that the removal of Shushkevich was part of a "creeping coup" that will steer the former Soviet republic back into the arms of Russia.

A former Communist who rose to the rank of lieutenant general in the republic's police force, Grib believes in strong measures to bring Belarus out of economic crisis, in monetary ties to Russia and in making the country nuclear-free.

"I'm firmly convinced without unity, without consolidating all forces, it will be very difficult to break out of the economic crisis in which we have found ourselves," Grib told television interviewers after the election.

"We should concentrate on our economic issues, and on the consolidation of economic ties with the Russian Federation," he said.

Shushkevich was voted out as parliament speaker in a no-confidence vote Wednesday after being accused of using state funds and building materials on his apartment and country house.

Reformers in the nation tucked between Russia and Poland said the corruption charges were just an excuse by hard-liners made more confident by the decline of reform forces in Moscow.

"Fascism is raising its head in Belarus as well as in Russia," Rygor Borodulin, a poet and democratic activist, told the Russian newspaper Izvestia.

He said the same "red-brown" coalition of nationalists and Communists that has opposed Russian President Boris Yeltsin's reforms managed to undo Shushkevich, a founder of the Commonwealth of Independent States and advocate of independence from Moscow.

Belarus' reforms have hardly begun, and it has been gripped by economic crisis.

by CNB