Belarus opposition confident of change despite
year of ‘hell’ unleashed by Lukashenko
A defiant young generation is a sign of hope, exiled
opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya tells POLITICO.
BY SERGEI
KUZNETSOV
August 8,
2021 6:06 pm
A year
after his tainted electoral victory, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko
continues to use violence and intimidation against his opponents at home and
abroad to cling to power.
But the
opposition isn’t giving up hope that he can be pushed out.
“The fight
took longer than we would like,” Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Lukashenko’s main
rival during the August 9, 2020 presidential election, said in an interview
with POLITICO. “But people don’t say we won’t succeed in the end, they just say
it takes too long and it is not clear when it will end.”
A year ago,
Tikhanovskaya led an unexpected alliance of three female politicians — with
Maria Kolesnikova and Veronika Tsepkalo — that many Belarusians hoped would
remove Lukashenko peacefully from the post he has occupied since 1994.
But
Lukashenko claimed an 80 percent victory in a vote that is widely seen as
fraudulent. Tikhanovskaya and Tsepkalo are in exile and Kolesnikova is on trial
in Belarus, facing up to 12 years in prison.
Lukashenko
rode out a wave of protests that shook the country after the election. The
resistance on the streets faded over the winter and hasn’t regained strength in
the face of arrests and sustained violence from security services loyal to
Lukashenko.
“We
believed there were so many of us [on the street] that we could prove to
Lukashenko that he lost the election. This gave us hope that the regime would
finally hear us, but it didn’t happen,” Tikhanovskaya said. “Moreover, the hell
that the regime created — we were not ready for that.”
Crackdown
Lukashenko
is showing no sign of loosening his grip.
All
prominent opposition leaders have either been arrested or forced out of the
country. Protesters have faced mass arrests. The regime is now rooting out the
few remaining independent media operations and NGOs — including education
institutions, human rights advocates and the local unit of the PEN-center
headed by Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Aleksievich, who lives in exile in
Germany.
In July,
Lukashenko branded such NGOs “bandits” and “foreign agents.”
“A purge is
underway,” he said. “Do you think it is easy? Thousands of people who have been
brainwashed are working there.”
According
to Belarusian human rights watchdogs, there are over 600 political prisoners in
the country. Almost 30 journalists are behind bars.
In addition
to cracking down at home, Lukashenko is showing increasingly little regard for
international norms.
The
authorities forced down a Ryanair airliner in May to arrest opposition blogger
Roman Protasevich, who was flying from Athens to Vilnius. As a result, state
airline Belavia has been banned from EU airspace and more sanctions were
imposed on Belarus. In retaliation, Belarus is encouraging asylum applicants to
fly to Minsk and then cross the EU border into Lithuania in what EU authorities
say is an effort to “weaponize” migration.
Ukrainian
police are investigating the death of Belarusian opposition activist Vitaly
Shishov, who was found hanged near his house in Kyiv earlier this month.
The
International Olympic Committee booted several Belarusian officials from the
Olympic Village after they were implicated in attempting to force sprinter
Krystsina Tsimanouskaya back to Belarus after she criticized her coaches,
Despite the
international backlash, Lukashenko’s retains a powerful ally in Russian
President Vladimir Putin.
“Lukashenko
realized he is unable to cope with defiant Belarusians on his own and made a
deal with … Putin,” said Andrei Kureichik, a prominent Belarusian playwright
and film director, who joined the opposition Coordination Council, a body set
up after the 2020 election to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.
He said
Putin and Lukashenko are simultaneously stifling independent media, human
rights activists and political opponents in their countries. “We can see how
synchronized these processes are,” Kureichik told POLITICO. “Unfortunately,
they share the methods of intimidation, repression and even political
assassination or attempted assassination.”
“The lack
of legitimacy, deficit of popular support, fear of losing power and of being
held accountable for crimes have pushed the authorities toward the worst
possible scenario: Turning the country into a concentration camp and seeking a
full protectorate with Russia,” added Kureichik, who lives in exile in
Slovakia.
He said
Shishov’s death in Ukraine means, “I am forced to take the matter of my safety
very seriously, even in Europe.”
Signs of
hope
Despite the
drumbeat of grim news, Tikhanovskaya still holds out hope for change.
She said
many grassroots communities — of medical professionals, journalists and
sportspeople — have been created in Belarus over the past year to support those
who have suffered from the crackdown.
“Such
structures had never existed in Belarus before,” Tikhanovskaya said. “People
want to help each other, they want to stay mobilized. The window of opportunity
is not very wide, but people do what they can.”
In a sign
of how the government’s intimidation can backfire, sprinter Tsimanouskaya, now
in exile in Poland, ended her news conference in Warsaw saying: “We are running
free, and Belarus will be free.”
The
Lukashenko regime understands that people cannot be silenced by repression, as
happened in the past, when “20 or even 100 people were jailed, and the rest
were scared … No, this time the struggle continues,” Tikhanovskaya said.
She also
pins her hopes on a new generation.
“The new
generation has grown up. This is not a generation of our parents, many of whom
have never been abroad. These [young] people never lived under the yoke of the
Soviet Union. We can see the difference,” she said. “The new generation is not
a generation of submissive people.”
But
Lukashenko has his own plan. He wants a revamp of the country’s constitution to
be approved in a February national referendum. It’s not clear what changes he
wants to make, but many political experts interpret his confusing statements as
a desire to create a new post for himself that will allow him to continue
running the country, while putting in a figurehead as a new president.
Tikhanovskaya
says that would be unacceptable.
“A new
president should act not for the sake of his entourage, but for the sake of
Belarusians. A new president should act according to the law, so people can
feel respect for the state,” she said. “The whole system should be altered.”
After a
pause, Tikhanovskaya added: “I don’t even think about such a scenario. If you
think that he will not leave, that some other loyal person will replace him,
then there is no incentive to move forward. Such thoughts simply kill
motivation [to act] in every person”.
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