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Of: TT
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Photo: Tut / AP / TT
A policeman tries to snatch the white-red-white opposition flags from Nina Bahinskaja, 73, during protests in Minsk, Belarus, on Saturday. Bahinskaya is said to have been arrested.
Security forces in Belarus have once again arrested protesters in the capital, Minsk. But protests continue against Alexander Lukashenko, whom they accuse of misleading the presidency in the August 9 elections.
According to video recordings posted on social media, one of the detainees is Nina Bahinskaja, a 73-year-old geologist who has participated in protests in the country for many years.
Nina Bahinskaja was also arrested last weekend, but was later released, according to the human rights organization Vjasna, which is trying to track who was arrested and what happened to them.
– Our president is Sveta, chanted a group of women before they were abruptly abducted by the riot police.
Sveta refers to opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who is currently in exile for fear of reprisals from the power apparatus surrounding Lukashenko.
During the protests, several of the protesters, including Nina Bahinskaya, carried the white-red-white opposition flag, which became the country’s flag after the liberation of the Soviet Union in 1991. Four years later, when Lukashenko took power, the white-red-white flag was eliminated.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, 66, is often called the last dictator in Europe. On Wednesday, he shocked the outside world and the citizens of Belarus when he suddenly took the oath of office for a new term as the country’s president.
After the August presidential elections, protests erupted on a scale not seen since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Since then, thousands of people have been arrested and there are numerous testimonies of beatings and torture by the police.
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