MINSK, Belarus (AP) – The Belarusian government blocked more than 50 media outlets covering weeks of protests that were not easy with the resignation of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, but protesters protested on Saturday, 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 large rally of defiance, around 200,000 protesters piled up in the capital Minsk on August 16, Lukashenko’s main electoral rival, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, called 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 after the election, knowing that some of the previous presidential rivals 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 you to “go from all corners and places,” said Anna Skuratovich, one of those on the canal.
Protesters said they were fed up with the decline in the country’s popular population and that they were in Lukashenko’s rejection of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as in his decades of crackdown on dissent.
“Lukashenko can offer nothing but tears for the USSR, bans and cheerleaders,” Tatian Orlovich said among the crowd at the night rally.
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’ll see they’re already dragging an “alternative president here,” he said, referring to Tsikhanouskaya.”The army is dazzling: the movement of NATO troops to borders.”