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‘TO. The crimes of Lukashenko’s dictatorship must be investigated, a 38-year-old female opponent demanded in a speech to the Senate in Prague on Wednesday. In the August 2020 presidential elections in Belarus, Cichanouskaya challenged the dictator Aliaksandr Lukashenko, who declared himself the winner.
The only way out of the crisis in Belarus is free elections, which would be monitored by international observers, Cichanouskaya said in the second chamber of the Czech parliament. He once again condemned the arrest of blogger Ramanas Pratasevičius.
Svetlana Cichanouskaya
During his stay in the Czech Republic for a few days, Mr. Cichanouskaya met, among others, with Prime Minister Andrei Babish and President Milos Zeman.
The latter wished him “victories in the fight against the last dictator in Europe.”
During his visits to EU countries, Cichanouskaya seeks to put more pressure on the Lukashenko government.
Belarus compares the situation with the Prague Spring
On Wednesday, Cichanouskaya compared the situation in his country to the crushing of the large-scale “Prague Spring” democratic reform movement in the former Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Following last August’s presidential elections in Belarus, which the opposition and Western democracies consider manipulated, Belarus has been rocked for months by unprecedented mass protests. Aliaksandr Lukashenko was declared the winner of that vote and secured for the sixth term.
S. Cichanouskaja, who challenged A. Lukashenko in the elections, was forced to go to Lithuania after them. In suppressing the mass protests, Belarusian officials detained thousands of people, many of whom were sentenced to severe prison terms.
“Belarusians are now experimenting and shaping historical events. In one day, it happens more than usual in a decade,” Cichanouskaya said in a speech to the Czech Senate.
“I think the Czech people know this feeling well from history, since 1968,” he said during his visit to Prague.
In August 1968, the Soviet-led army suppressed a democratic reform movement, called the “Prague Spring,” to rid itself of Moscow’s communist influence.
S. Cichanouskaja, who currently lives in Lithuania, saw similarities between the events of 1968, the crash landing of a Ryanair plane in Minsk, and the arrest of Raman Pratasevičius, a Belarusian opposition blogger who flew there.
“A document drawn up by the Soviet government stated that the Czech leaders themselves had invited the Warsaw Pact [šalių] troops to invade Czechoslovakia, “Cichanouskaya said.” The Lukashenko regime is saying today that the pilot of the Ryanair plane himself demanded that he be allowed to land in Minsk. “
He also mentioned the Prague-born writer Franz Kafka, famous for his surreal novels.
“Belarusians bitterly joke that if Kafka lived in our time, he would not write, because he could not create anything more absurd than the Belarusian courts,” he said. “When the law is no longer in force in a country, you can be locked up for a month and a half in prison for the color of your pants or nails, and solidarity can become a crime.”
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