MINSK, Belarus – The Belarusian government blocked more than 50 media outlets that covered weeks of protests, which was not easy with the resignation of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, but demonstrators protested Saturday, and some formed a chain of solidarity in the capital.
The Belarusian Journalists Association reported on Saturday on closures, which included sites for Radio Liberty and Belsat, a Polish-funded satellite television channel specializing in neighboring Belarus. The state publishing space also stopped printing two main independent newspapers, Narodnaya Volya and Komsomolskaya Pravda, which caused the device to malfunction.
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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 now anti-government movements have been introduced in some of the country’s major factories, lukashenko’s former bases. Some police officers posted videos of themselves burning their uniforms and resigning upset by the government response.
At a massive defiance demonstration, around 200,000 protesters gathered in the capital, Minsk, on August 16. Lukashenko’s main electoral rival, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, called for a primary opposition demonstration 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 pro-government demonstration in Minsk on 16 August attracted a quarter more people than the protest march. On Saturday, only about 25 others showed up for a motorcycle ride by the president.
On Saturday, many white dressed formed a human chain in Minsk in protest. Another demonstration in the evening amassed 3,000 people.
“Threats, bullying, blocking no longer work. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians tell him to “go from all corners and places,” said Anna Skuratovich, one of the channel’s.
Protesters say they are fed up with the decline in life in the country and have been angry about Lukashenko’s rejection of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as his decades of crackdown on dissent.
“Lukashenko can’t be offering anything yet for tears for the USSR, bans and batons,” Tatian Orlovich said in the crowd during the evening demonstration.
Lukashenko alleges that the protests were encouraged through Western forces, adding the United States, and that NATO deployed forces near the western border of Belarus. The alliance flatly denies it.
The 65-year-old leader repeated the indictment on Saturday on a stopover in an 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 evident: the movement of NATO troops towards borders.”
Lukashenko then spoke at a demonstration of several thousand supporters in Grodno, where he threatened to close the factories that were still on strike since Monday. The strikes have affected some of the country’s major companies, adding vehicle and fertilizer manufacturers a possible blow to the largely state-controlled economy that has been suffering for years.
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On Friday, the government threatened demonstrators with criminals’ rates in an effort to avoid protests. Investigators also called on several opposition activists for questioning themselves as part of a criminal investigation into a council they created to coordinate a force transition for the former Soviet republic of 9.5 million people.
The data in this article was provided through Jim Heintz of the Associated Press.