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A woman kneels on the ground while others create a human chain at a demonstration in Minsk, Belarus.Protesters take to the streets of the Belarusian capital and other cities, proceeding to their efforts to call for the resignation of the country’s authoritarian leader. President Alexander Lukashenko extended his term for 26 years in a vote that the opposition considered rigged.
MINSK, BIELORRUSIA – The Belarusian government blocked more than 50 media outlets covering weeks of protests, which was not easy with authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko’s resignation, however, protesters continued to protest today, and some formed a chain of solidarity in the capital.
The Belarusian Journalists Association reported Saturday on closures, which included sites for Radio Liberty and Belsat, a Polish-funded satellite television channel that specializes in neighboring Belarus.The state publishing space also stopped printing two major independent newspapers, Narodnaya Volya and Komsomolskaya Pravda.bringing up the malfunction of the appliance.
Unprecedented protests in Belarus over its duration and duration erupted after the presidential election on 9 August, in which Lukashenko was said to have won a sixth term in a crushing way. Protesters allege the official effects are fraudulent and call on Lukashenko to resign after 26 years in power.
Police first reacted harshly to the protests, arresting another 7,000 people and beating many of them, but police repression has only expanded the scope of the protests and anti-government measures have now been introduced in some of the country’s major factories., Lukashenko’s former bases.Some police officers released videos of themselves burning their uniforms and resigning disgusted by the government’s response.
In a major demonstration of defiance, around 200,000 protesters gathered in the capital, Minsk, on 16 August, Lukashenko’s main electoral rival, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, called for a large opposition rally on Sunday.
“We are more than ever in our dream,” he said in a video message from Lithuania, where he took refuge in a safe haven after the election, knowing that some previous presidential challengers in Belarus had been imprisoned for years.
Public demonstrations in Lukashenko, which has ruled Belarus with an iron hand since 1994, have been relatively modest.A government demonstration in Minsk on 16 August attracted about a quarter more than the protest march.On Saturday, only about 25 others showed up for a motorcycle ride through the president.
On Saturday, a bunch of white dresses formed a human chain in Minsk in protest.Another demonstration at night amassed 3,000 people.
“Threats, intimidation, blocking no longer work.Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians tell her to “leave “from all corners and places,” Anna Skuratovich, one of the women of the canal.
Protesters say they are fed up with the country’s declining quality of life and have been angry about Lukashenko’s rejection of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as his decades of crackdown on dissent.
“Lukashenko can’t offer anything yet tears for the USSR, bans and cheerleaders,” Tatian Orlovich said in the crowd during the nightly demonstration.
Lukashenko alleges that protests were encouraged through Western forces, adding the United States, and that NATO deployed forces near Belarus’s western border, something the alliance flatly denies.
The 65-year-old leader repeated the accusation on Saturday on a stopover at army training in the Grodno region, near the borders of Poland and Lithuania.
“You see they’re already dragging an ‘alternative president’ here,” he said, referring to Tsikhanouskaya.”The army is clear: the movement of NATO troops to borders.”
Lukashenko later spoke at a rally of several thousand supporters in Grodno, where he threatened to close the factories that were still on strike on Monday.part of the state-controlled economy that has been suffering for years.
On Friday, the government threatened protesters with criminal rates in an effort to avoid protests. Investigators also convened several opposition activists for questioning themselves as part of an investigation of criminals on a council they created to coordinate a transition of force for the former Soviet republic of 9.5 billion people.
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