KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – More than 700 more people were arrested in mass protests in Belarus opposed to the re-election of the country’s authoritarian leader in the toughest weeks-long crackdown on protesters.
The Belarusian Ministry of the Interior reported on Monday that a total of 713 more people had been arrested at demonstrations across the country the previous day, and 570 of them were still in detention pending a court.
The protests were not easy: President Alexander Lukashenko’s resignation took a position in several cities on Sunday, with the largest crowd gathered in the capital, Minsk. The Human Rights Centre in Viasna estimated that around 100,000 people attended the Minsk rally. Police temporarily moved to dispersarse. la demonstration with water cannons, stun grenades and batons, preventing teams from other people elsewhere in the city from merging into a giant single collection.
Dozens more were injured in what human rights defenders described as the toughest dispersion of a Sunday demonstration since August.
Mass protests have rocked Belarus since 9 August, when the effects of the presidential election gave Lukashenko a victory with 80% of the vote and his main rival, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, 10%. Tsikhanouskaya and her supporters refused to acknowledge the effects of the vote, saying the largest demonstrations took place on Sunday and attracted up to 200,000 people.
In the early days of the protests, the Belarusian government seriously suppressed the protesters, and police arrested thousands more people and wounded dozens of others with batons, rubber bullets and stun grenades.
The violent reaction to rallies provoked foreign outrage. The European Union and the United States have slapped dozens of Belarusian officials with sanctions for their role in manipulating votes and cracking down on protests, but they have targeted Lukashenko, who has ruled the country with an iron hand for 26 years.
Since then, the government has reduced violence but maintained pressure, stopping a lot of protesters and chasing high-level activists. Prominent members of the Opposition Coordination Council, trained to drive a power transition, were arrested or forced to leave the country.
More than 40 hounds were arrested over the weekend, adding 25 in Minsk, the Belarusian Association of Journalists said. Fifteen Belarusian hounds face 15 days of administrative arrest for disobeying the police. Many saw the device being seeded.
“The government seeks to save the politics of protests by beating and stopping journalists, fleeing their accreditation and creating catastrophic conditions for running,” Andrei Bastunets, director of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, told The Associated Press.
Earlier this month, the Belarusian government cancelled the accreditation of all hounds running for foreign media and said they had to apply for new credentials, which some foreign media had won last week. Belarusian news covering the protests extensively.
Tsikhanouskaya, who has recently been exiled in Lithuania after leaving Belarus under pressure from the authorities, suggested that the EU impose larger sanctions against Lukashenko and his allies, in comments to the Palestinian Authority on Monday.
“Yesterday we saw an escalation of violence through the authorities. Once again, many others are arrested, beaten, wounded and crippled. Despite the non-violent nature of the protests, repressions are intensifying,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
Lukashenko and his affiliates will be added to the sanctions list with law enforcement agencies interested in taking strong action against protesters, he added.
“I call on our European partners to act temporarily and decisively,” Tsikhanouskaya said.