Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, the man dubbed “Europe’s last dictator”, seems to underestimate at least two serious threats to his 26-year rule.
One is a microscopic infection, the coronavirus, which has killed hundreds of its countrymen. The other: masses of women, many of them dressed in white, join hands in a show of challenging solidarity in the streets of Minsk, the capital of the former Soviet republic.
The country, home to 9.5 million people, has been ravaged by protests since Lukashenko, his longtime president, was declared by election officials the winner of Sunday’s national elections.
With signs of blatant voting rights, human rights groups, the European Union, the United Nations and the Trump administration have all questioned the fairness of the election and decided on the brutal treatment of peaceful Protestants.
Throughout the week, a security crackdown on opposition protesters has escalated. Nearly 7,000 people have been arrested, the Interior Ministry said Thursday. Viral videos showed shockingly violent beatings of Protestants; reports trickled out of appalling prison conditions and torture of detainees.
Adding a new dimension to the unrest, workers at factories in the state – a key constituency of Lukashenko – began on Thursday to lay down their tools and strike steps. And several well-known news anchors at state-run outlets have stopped, not ready to speak to the government line.
One of the most striking views from days of protests was women forming ‘solidarity chains’, weighing flowers or portraits of prisoners, and demanding an end to police brutality, while passing motorists paid tribute to their support.
“People are no longer scared here in this country,” Natalia Denisova, a lawyer and election monitor, told the BBC. “They want an honest election – that’s all they want.”
Three of the country’s main opposition figures are women, including the main opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who, under pressure from legislation, fled to neighboring Lithuania after filing a formal complaint about the election results. .
Even in a fairly traditional society, where many women adhere to traditional gender roles, the views of 65-year-old Lukashenko are seen by many as retrograde; he has said the country is not ready for a female leader.
Until the takeover for her husband, a prisoner blogger, Tikhanovskaya, 37, was an avid homemaker and mother, but she proved a charismatic figure, and her supporters ran an adept social media campaign.
“She was clearly severely underestimated by Lukashenko,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, Britain’s ambassador to Belarus in 2008-09. The role of women in both the election campaign and the protests, he said, was “distinctive and important … I can not think of any of these kinds of events in the region with such a strong and significant gender element on them.”
Belarus’s only Nobel laureate in literature, Svetlana Alexievich, added her voice to the protests, condemning the violence and saying Lukashenko should step down.
“Get out before it’s too late, before you have driven the people into a terrible abyss – into the abyss of civil war,” the 72-year-old writer said on Wednesday in an interview with Radio Liberty’s Belarusian service. her remarks on the longtime leader. Alexievich was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature for her work that worked on chronic repression and official malfeasance in former Soviet republics.
European Union foreign ministers met on Friday to consider imposing sanctions on Belarus. On Thursday, foreign envoys in Minsk laid flowers at the site where a protester died this week. Authorities said he was carrying an explosive device that went off while he was preparing to throw, a version of events challenged by opposition activists.
Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo traveled to the region as the unrest in Belarus unfolded, reiterating hopes for a “better outcome” for the people of Belarus.
“I am sure the EU and the United States share the same concerns about what has happened, and what is happening, in Belarus,” he said Thursday in Slovenia. Pompeo drew criticism for not mentioning Belarus in a speech delivered a day earlier to Czech lawmakers on freedom in “the heart of Europe.”
The EU treats some caution, and does not want to ride Lukashenko in a closer embrace with Russia. Although the President of Belarus has had some tensions with Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he does not want the country to look to the West and seek EU membership or deepen partnerships with NATO.
The Belarussian leader has spoken out angrily against what he calls outside interference, with Eastern European neighbors Poland and the Czech Republic singling along with Britain. He has received warm congratulations for the vote of a few world leaders, most authoritarian-minded like himself, including Putin and China Xi Jinping, who, like him, have no need for leadership.
Analysts said opposition to Lukashenko, built over years as Belarus’s economic situation deteriorated, was crystallized by its deviant response to the COVID-19 outbreak, which he called “coronapsychosis.”
As the country’s caseload mounted – Belarus now has some 70,000 reported infections, and nearly 600 deaths, among the highest rates per capita in Europe – it dismissed shutdown orders and other mitigation measures, encouraging people to become infected quit by taking saunas and drinking vodka.
With the outside world paying more than the days were over, the protests were at a tense moment. Analysts warned that if he felt cornered, Lukashenko could declare a state of emergency, similar to martial law – although that would increase the risk for the president that the military might not be ready to put up with massive unrest.
“It could be a milestone moment,” said Minsk-based analyst Artyom Shraibman. “There’s just no way to reverse the course of change.”
Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report.
