It is a sobering fact that in Belarus, only 1,000 miles from London, the leader of a regime suspected of making its opponents disappear is almost certainly about to get re-elected.

This incongruity grows even more unfathomable when you meet President Alexander Lukashenko's perfectly reasonable opponents, who recently launched an international day of protest that is held every month on the 16th and spread to the Belarusian embassy in Washington last week. They included a 27-year-old newspaper editor and student at John Hopkins University who was recently threatened with six years in prison for supposedly printing her newspaper with "dangerous ink", and the widow of a businessman who vanished six years ago along with the deputy speaker of parliament, another critic of the regime.

Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, a Michigan Republican and member of the House of Representatives' International Relations Committee, was the star visitor at the event. He wore jeans, in honour of the "Denim Revolution" called by the opposition ahead of the elections on March 19. The polls are widely expected to be rigged and to extend another term in office to the man whose leadership style since 1994 has won his country the label of Europe's last dictatorship.

Most experts agree that the chances of pulling off the Belarusian equivalent of Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" are slim: Lukashenko kicked his opponents out of parliament long ago, the state apparatus is extremely well-oiled and the president last month promised that there would be "no disturbances" like in other former Soviet countries, where opposition leaders were recently brought to power. If there were, he said, "we'll give them such a going over they won't know what hit them." He signed a chilling law in December that promised up to two years' imprisonment for discrediting the state and its authorities, membership of a liquidated political party or training people to participate in mass protests.

American politicians from President Bush and Condoleezza Rice downwards have lavished more attention than ever before to the state of Belarusian democracy. Since Bush took office, the State Department has openly accused Lukashenko of running a death squad. However, the US prerogative still seems to be to avoid ruffling feathers in Moscow, which continues to support Lukashenko with cheap energy and by not stifling his experiment in post-Soviet Soviet-ness.

So, other than the eloquent Mr McCotter, the protesters had to satisfy themselves with an occasional pro-democracy "honk" from a passing car, the devotion of a few American students and some like-minded Baltic Americans, and the enthusiasm of a mixed bag of others, including Alice Kipel, whose grandparents fled Belarus for the United States at the end of the Second World War. Both her grandfathers served time in the gulag, which may explain her rather philosophical remark that compared to Stalin, life in Belarus is not bad. The war slaughtered one in four Belarusians, so it is hard to disagree that things have improved since the middle of the 20th century.