Belarus’ Lukashenko Reveals No Signal Of Bending To Protests : NPR

Folks protest on the Independence Sq. in Minsk on Thursday.

Sergei Grits/AP

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Sergei Grits/AP

Folks protest on the Independence Sq. in Minsk on Thursday.

Sergei Grits/AP

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko seems to be regaining the higher hand after mass demonstrations in opposition to his reelection in an Aug. 9 vote criticized as neither free nor honest by the U.S. and the European Union.

For opposition supporters, a way of dread is changing the euphoria of a number of the largest protests in Belarus since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

“The federal government is now tightening the screws very tightly, and it is turning into fairly harmful,” stated Yelena, 44, a volunteer within the marketing campaign workplace of Viktor Babariko, one in every of Lukashenko’s challengers within the election who was barred from working and jailed on fraud prices.

“This week individuals continued to exit on the road, regardless of all of the threats and warnings that they’d be arrested,” stated Yelena, who requested that her final identify not be used as a result of she faces persecution as an opposition activist.

“It is grow to be scary as a result of they’ll go after you merely for issues like the colour of your garments,” she stated. “It is like George Orwell’s 1984. They will punish you for sporting pink and white, or a white bracelet, or a T-shirt with a slogan.”

Belarus’ white-red-white flag has grow to be an emblem of the opposition to Lukashenko, who, after turning into president in 1994, launched a inexperienced and pink flag paying homage to the nation’s Soviet-era flag.

Crimson and white turned the colours of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the opposition candidate who united the three campaigns of her jailed husband Sergei Tikhanovsky, Babariko and Viktor Tsepkalo, a former ambassador to the U.S. who needed to flee the nation. After the election, Tikhanovskaya too was compelled to depart Belarus, and is now primarily based in neighboring Lithuania.

What’s left of the organized opposition to Lukashenko is a “coordination council” that wishes to facilitate a dialogue with the regime for a peaceable transition of energy. Lukashenko refuses to speak to the group, and the authorities have opened a prison case in opposition to it.

On Wednesday, investigators known as in Svetlana Alexievich, Belarus’ Nobel literature laureate and a council member, for questioning. Earlier two leaders of the council got 10-day jail sentences for allegedly holding an unlawful rally.

“We is not going to be silenced and neglect what occurred. We demand all these accountable be investigated and dropped at justice, and that legislation and justice be restored,” Maria Kolesnikova, one of many council’s leaders, stated in a video attraction this week.

Within the first days of the protests, police arrested nearly 7,000 demonstrators. After they have been launched from jail, lots of them spoke of being subjected to indiscriminate beatings and torture.

The protests and strikes that adopted rattled the Lukashenko regime, says Artyom Shraibman, a political analyst in Minsk, however now the demonstrations within the capital aren’t as widespread and visual as earlier than.

It is nonetheless too early to say that Lukashenko has received, Shraibman says, as a result of protesters may prove in pressure if the crackdown is simply too harsh.

“Till the protests have subsided fully, we can not say they’re over as a result of they’re principally like hearth,” Shraibman stated. “In idea, the authorities are able to placing some extra gasoline on the hearth.”

The opposition council, he stated, has restricted room for maneuver.

“Most likely one of the best factor that they’ll do is resist all of Lukashenko’s efforts to pull them into framing the battle as geopolitical,” Shraibman stated.

On Friday, Lukashenko visited a cheese manufacturing unit within the metropolis of Orsha, draping a white cape over his swimsuit as he inspected the equipment. It wasn’t lengthy earlier than he was warning dairy employees that American F-16 fighter planes have been now only a 20-minute flight away from the border — perhaps even armed with nuclear weapons, he stated.

“They do not want Belarus. Belarus is only a springboard, as traditional, to get to Russia,” Lukashenko stated, referring to Swedish, French and German invasions over the centuries that every one led by means of Belarus.

Lukashenko has been speaking up the menace from Belarus’ NATO neighbors ever since mass protests broke out after the disputed election, which he claimed to have received in a landslide. Earlier than the vote, Lukashenko had warned that it was enemies primarily based in Russia who have been making an attempt to divide Belarus.

A political survivor, Lukashenko has now secured the Kremlin’s backing whereas branding his home opponents as pawns of the West. On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that on Lukashenko’s request, Russia had put collectively a rapid-reaction pressure that would intervene in Belarus if crucial. That very same night, Lukashenko’s riot police detained greater than 260 individuals at a peaceable rally in Minsk, together with 50 journalists.

However Putin’s assist for Lukashenko has alienated many Belarusians, who typically have heat emotions towards Russia.

“We anticipated one thing else. We all the time assumed that Putin and Russia would assist the Belarusian individuals and never one explicit particular person, particularly once they see how arduous it’s for Belarusians proper now,” stated opposition activist Yelena.

She stated she hopes the climate is nice this weekend so individuals prove for renewed protests throughout the nation.

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