[ad_1]
Despite threats of violence from the Belarusian police, Minsk women have gathered for a new protest march against President Alexander Lukashenko. As on Saturday a week ago, there were numerous arrests, according to a civil rights portal, there were a good 200.
“We don’t forget! We don’t forgive!” and “Lukashenko, on the prisoner transporter,” protesters chanted at the Komarovsky central market on Saturday. The prisoners’ vans waited at various locations. Motorists honk their horns in solidarity with women, as reported by a reporter for the dpa news agency.
Among those arrested is Nina Baginskaja, 73, who was forced into a pickup truck. Baginskaya is a veteran of the protest movement and has been known as a dissident since her fight against communists in Soviet times.
Since the presidential elections on August 9, there have been daily protests in Belarus. Lukashenko had been declared the winner of the elections with 80.1 percent of the votes. The 66-year-old has been in office for 26 years and is running for a sixth term. The opposition, however, sees Svetlana Tichanowskaya as the real winner.
The protest march traveled several streets on Saturday without police intervention. “Long live Belarus!” The women shouted as they carried the historic white, red and white flags. Sometimes they opened umbrellas in the colors of the revolution because the security forces repeatedly confiscated the flags. Dissident Baginskaya lost her seventh flag on Saturday, she sews it herself.
The protesters are demanding new elections without Lukashenko, the release of all political prisoners and the prosecution of police violence. Also in other cities of the country, women were summoned, as on previous Saturdays, to demonstrate peacefully against “the last dictatorship in Europe.” The Girl Power Belarus organizers announced this on their news channel on Telegram.
Opposition policy Tichanovskaya praised the bravery of the women from their exile in the EU. “They leave, even though they are constantly scared and pressured,” said the 38-year-old. At the same time, he accused Lukashenko’s “regime” of instrumentalizing children. Authorities had put the six-year-old son of Minsk activist Jelena Lasartschik in a house on Friday.
Hundreds of people asked that their son be returned to his parents on Saturday off the premises. Lasartschik left the house with the boy in the morning, to shouts of “Hurray” and applause from the crowd.
During the election campaign, Tichanovskaya also reported that she had been threatened with losing her children. She then had her son and daughter brought to neighboring EU country Lithuania. Her colleague Viktoria Zepkalo had also protected her children from access by the authorities in this way.
“They are trying to give us a choice: to be loyal to our own children or to the country,” Tichanovskaya wrote in a statement. But such intentions are ineffective because the determination of women is underestimated.
