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Wednesday, September 09, 2020
She was missing for two days, it is now clear: the leader of the opposition, Kolesnikova, is in pre-trial detention in Minsk and must defend herself against the charge of an attempted seizure of power. Colleagues praise her bravery. The dictator Lukashenko is now likely to fear it too.
Two days after her abduction, it is now clear where the arrested opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova is located. Both her lawyer and her father reported that she was in pretrial detention in Minsk. Kolesnikova was arrested on charges of attempted power, her lawyer said. Her home was raided during a raid and searched. Her father, Alexander Kolesnikov, also said that the Belarus Investigation Committee had called him and told him that his daughter had been detained.
The investigation committee later confirmed Kolesnikova’s arrest. The 38-year-old man disappeared Monday. The authorities are said to have pressured her to go to Ukraine. When she refused to leave the country and tore up her passport, she was arrested. Kolesnikowa is one of the most famous faces of the democratic movement that opposes the authoritarian head of state Alexander Lukashenko. She is in the Coordinating Council of the opposition, which wants a peaceful change of power. Some members of the committee’s staff have already been arrested or forced to leave the country.
The power apparatus of the Belarusian head of state Lukashenko has been repressing the opposition for days with raids and arrests. Masked men stormed the democracy movement headquarters that morning, took computers and documents, and then sealed the room at a business center in Minsk. The men also arrested opposition lawyer Maxim Snak, who was one of the last members of the Presidium of the Civil Society Coordination Council to remain free.
Campaign mates praise Kolesnikowa’s courage
Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was deeply shocked by the action taken against her colleagues at the Presidium. “Lukashenko is perpetrating terror against his own people,” the 72-year-old told reporters at his apartment in central Minsk. She also felt pressured by the authorities and deplored the fact that the electrical device had been spying for weeks. Diplomats also flocked to the scene because it was sometimes feared that the world-famous perpetrator could also be arrested.
Alexievich praised the courage of the opposition leader Kolesnikova. Kolesnikova also described former presidential candidate Svetlana Tichanovskaya, who fled into involuntary exile abroad, as a “heroine”. The former musician, who was active on the Stuttgart cultural scene for a long time, had always emphasized not being afraid and fighting Lukashenko to the end.
Faced with daily protests, the writer Alexievich spoke of an “uprising” against Lukashenko and again warned of the danger of a civil war. He complained that hundreds of people were arrested. He urged the apparatus to engage in dialogue to resolve the crisis. Alexievich, like most of the other members of the Presidium of the Coordinating Council, had recently been summoned for questioning. Four of seven members of the leadership are in detention and two have left the country under pressure from the authorities. The writer is the only one still free in Minsk. “First they stole our land, now they are taking the best of us,” he said. But hundreds more would come in their place.
