MINSK / KYIV (Reuters) – With a bunch of flowers and surrounded by clapping supporters, Belarus’s most famous writer has given a powerful voice to the opposition against President Alexander Lukashenko, even though she has so far barred a leadership role. nobody.
FILE PHOTO: The 2015 Nobel Prize winner for literature Svetlana Alexievich is interviewed by State Commission of Inquiry in Minsk, Belarus 26 August 2020. REUTERS / Vasily Fedosenko
Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, has mostly kept a low profile and spent years in exile under Lukashenko’s long rule. But she has become more vocal since unrest erupted following an August 9 election.
After security forces defeated Protestants and arrested thousands to stop mass demonstrations and strikes, the 72-year-old Alexievich said she was inclined to enter the fight.
“If I was younger and not sick, then probably. “Even now I will help with all my might, but to lead the movement, I have no physical and moral strength left,” she told Radio Liberty on August 12.
However, Alexievich agreed to support a Coordinating Council formed in opposition to Lukashenko after the election, which he is accused of rigging to extend his 26-year rule.
Lukashenko denies electoral fraud and calls the council an illegal attempt to seize power. Two leading councilors were jailed this week and on Wednesday Alexievich was named as a witness in a criminal case against the body.
She seized the opportunity to call on the world, especially Russia, to intervene to bring Lukashenko to the negotiating table and criticize police violence against Protestants “when they turned people into flesh”.
The flowers she brought with her had symbolic significance: Protestants had formed human chains and carried flowers, sometimes placing them at the feet of security.
“Their participation in the council is certainly unusual. This is real politics, and she has always avoided politics, “said political analyst Valery Karbalevich.
‘SHOW THE SCALES’
“She has always believed that creative intelligence does not have to be on the barricades. But now that has changed. There is a revolution in the country, the scales are swinging, and even a small change in weight can balance it out. tap in one direction or another. ”
Alexievich’s rise in the spotlight of the opposition comes with most of Lukashenko’s opponents in prison as exiles, in particular Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who took the place of her prisoner husband in the election campaign, but in the meantime Lithuania fled.
Opposition figures in exile include Valery Tsepkalo, a former ambassador to Washington, and Andrei Sannikov, who was imprisoned after trying to run against Lukashenko in 2010.
Nikolai Statkevich, five years in prison after facing Lukashenko in 2010, has been re-arrested.
Alexievich gained notoriety with writings describing the hardships of life in the Soviet Union and its consequences, through interviews with people living through tumultuous events.
Her documentary writing style became popular in the 1980s, but her humanistic, emotional stories about popular life entangled in major historical developments made her an uncomfortable voice for the authorities.
Publication of one of her most famous works, “Unfrau female war”, was censored because Soviet authorities considered it subversive and undermining the victory of World War II two.
Alexievich lived in exile in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden because of her criticism of the Belarussian government. When she returned in 2011, she was inclined to stay out of politics.
Protests erupted before the election amid frustration over Lukashenko’s treatment of the coronavirus pandemic, which he called a “psychosis” that could be cured by drinking vodka and driving tractors.
Alexievich compared the authorities’ behavior with the secrecy and denial surrounding the Soviet government’s treatment of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, an event that was the subject of one of its books.
When Viktor Babariko, a former banker who was considered the most powerful opposition candidate against Lukashenko, was arrested in June, she acted as bail for him.
And when protests erupted, she openly called on Lukashenko to step aside.
“Go before it’s too late, before you plunge the people into a terrible abyss, into the abyss of civil war! Go away! Nobody wants Maidan, nobody wants blood. Only you want power.”
Maidan refers to the street protests in Ukraine in 2014 that ousted a Russian-backed president and put the country on track for closer ties with the European Union.
Written by Matthias Williams; edited by Sujata Rao and Mark Heinrich
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