Belarusian moscow security forces arrested dozens of protesters on Sunday and used force, adding water cannons and batons, to disperse crowds that are not easy in a new presidential election, showed television photographs.
Images published through local media showed policemen dressed in black hoods dragging protesters in unmarked black vans and beating them with batons at a demonstration that lured thousands of people to the streets of the capital, Minsk.
Massive opposition demonstrations have been a weekly since Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election in August.
The images showed a police van throwing a strong stream of water from a canyon into the crowd, visibly pushing them.
Belarus, a former Soviet republic strongly allied with Russia, has been shaken by street protests and movements since the government announced that veteran leader Alexander Lukashenko had won a crushing vote on August 9.
Since then, others have taken to the streets every week to call for President Lukashenko’s resignation and allow new elections to take place.
Mr Lukashenko, a former director of the collective farm in force since 1994, denies that his victory is the result of a trap.
Security forces arrested more than 13,000 people in a post-election offensive, some of whom were later released.
Lukashenko’s main conflicting political parties are abroad or have fled.
Sunday’s violence follows an assembly Lukashenko held saturday with an inmate in a Minsk criminal, a rare occasion that led some opposition activists to prepare for concessions.
In a rare concession, two other people who had participated in the assembly with President Lukashenko, businessman Yuri Voskresensky and Dmitry Rabtsevich, director of Minsk software manufacturer PandaDoc, were released on Sunday night (Monday AEDT), Belarusian state television reported.
The United States, the European Union, Britain and Canada have imposed sanctions opposed to a number of senior Belarusians accused of fraud and human rights violations following the presidential election.
Opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, now in Lithuania, called for new elections and the release of all political prisoners.
“We will continue to march peacefully and persistently and ask for what belongs to us: new releases and elections,” Tsikhanouskaya wrote on his Telegram channel on Sunday.
Similar rallies were held in other cities in the country on Sunday.
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