MINSK, Belarus (AP) – Belarusian police on Monday arrested several prominent opposition activists and a handful of protesters who took part in a wave of protests challenging the re-election of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko in a vote they said was manipulated.
The Coordination Council, created through the opposition to negotiate a power move, said members Sergei Dylevsky and Olga Kovalkova were being held in the capital of Minsk. Later, the opposition also reported the arrest of Alexander Lavrinovich, a leader of the strike. in a commercial factory.
Police also arrested at least five of the several hundred people who had accumulated in Minsk Independence Square on Monday, the sixteenth consecutive day of protests, and five others in other cities, activists said.
These movements marked Lukashenko’s determination to quell the post-election protests that are entering his third week. The 65-year-old Belarusian leader, in force since 1994, brandished an attack rifle in a show of force upon arriving at his home by helicopter. Sunday as protesters piled up nearby.
Last week, Lukashenko warned that opposition council members could be accused of creating what he described as a parallel government. Prosecutors then opened a criminal investigation into fees for endangering national security, an indictment rejected by the council.
Several other board members, adding Belarus’s highest notorious Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, were summoned to be questioned about the protests in an obvious attempt by the government to intimidate them.
Dylevsky played a leading role in organizing a strike at the Minsk tractor factory, one of several industry union movements in primary factories last week in protests that posed a major challenge to Lukashenko. Lavrinovich led the strike-building committee at another giant factory, the Minsk wheel crane factory.
Kovalkova is one of the main officials of the main opponent of the opposition in the controversial elections of 9 August, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who entered the contest after her husband was imprisoned and prevented from running and fled to Lithuania after the vote under official pressure.
Tsikhanouskaya met on Monday with U. S. Undersecretary of State Stephen Biegun in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and in a statement issued through the headquarters of his crusade, he reaffirmed his willingness to talk about a transition from strength to crisis in Belarus. States for their help to the Belarusian people.
“She’s a very impressive user and I can see why she’s so popular in her country,” Biegun said after assembling it. “America cannot and will not do so in the course of the occasions in Belarus, it is the law of the Belarusian people. “
The United States and the European Union rejected the election because it was neither loose nor fair and suggested that the government interact in the discussion with the opposition.
Sunday’s anti-Lukashenko demonstration in Minsk attracted around 200,000 people to resign. A demonstration the previous week attracted a number of the largest meetings ever held in the former Soviet country of 9. 5 million more people.
The protests call for the official effects of the election, which gave Lukashenko a sixth term with 80% of the vote unlikely.
The president, who cultivates an air of machismo, the opposition as puppets of the West and accused the United States of fomenting unrest.
Sunday’s video showed him leaving his helicopter with a Kalashnikov automatic rifle and accompanied by his 15-year-old youngest son, who was also carrying a rifle.
The Belarusian leader pointed out to his assistants that the protesters “fled like rats” and then thanked the police surrounding the presidential residence.
“The government is afraid of the majority and is obviously nervous,” Maria Kolesnikova, a member of the opposition council, said in describing Lukashenko’s movements in the face of protests.
He described his peers’ arrests as “a rude tension and to frighten us. “
“They forget our discussion proposals and respond with repression,” he told The Associated Press.
Protests were galvanized through brutal repression in the first few days after the election, when police arrested some 7,000 more people and hundreds of people were injured when officials dispersed nonviolent protesters with rubber bullets, stun grenades and clubs. People died.
Lukashenko on Monday fired Belarusian Ambassador to Slovakia, Igor Leshchenya, who denounced the crackdown and resigned.
As the crowd grew amid public outrage, the government subsidized and allowed protests to continue unhindered, however, they have tightened police cordons around the city since last week and threatened opposition activists with unscrupulous prosecution.
Five protesters who installed improvised audio devices for loudspeakers in Independence Square on Monday night were arrested by police, Valiantsin Stefanovich of the Viasna Rights Center said. The square has been the epicentre of meetings and the police had not intervened in more than 12 days.
Five other protesters were arrested in other cities, Stefanovich said, pointing to the government’s hardening of their position. “With vigorous ad hoc measures, the government must neutralize the maximum asset,” he said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokeswoman Steffen Seibert criticized the threats against on-strike staff and deplored “the very martial and threatening backdrop lukashenko created this weekend. “He said that “a discussion between leaders and Belarusian society is urgently needed. “
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on his stopover in Ukraine on Monday that Germany, which has recently held the EU presidency, suggested russia use its influence over Lukashenko “to make it transparent that it can no longer approve of this dialogue. “
U. S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said Biegun, the No. 2 U. S. diplomat who will stop in Moscow on Tuesday and Wednesday, “will urge the Russian government to join us in respecting the democratic rights and aspirations of Belarusians. people, and not intervene in this process. “
Russia and Belarus have a union treaty with close political, economic and military ties, and Lukashenko said he had secured Russian President Vladimir Putin’s promise to provide security assistance if necessary.
The Belarusian leader sought to gather Moscow’s help by seeking to paint his enemies as anti-Russian, protesters in Belarus showed no anti-Russian slogans.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow had departed from contacts with the Belarusian opposition, arguing that such a move would amount to interfering in a neighbor’s internal affairs.
“We believe this is false and we don’t have the goal of doing it, at least not during the current phase,” Peskov said.
Lukashenko, who was looking for Putin amid the protests, also accused NATO of harboring competitive plans and strengthening its forces in neighboring Poland and Lithuania, and ordered great army training near its borders. The alliance rejected Lukashenko’s claims.
Lukashenko said he and Putin had another call on Monday to discuss the domestic scene in Belarus and the advances on its western border. The Kremlin said in its reading of the call that Lukashenko had informed Putin of his efforts to “normalize the scene in the country. “
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Associated Press writers Vladimir Isachenkov and Jim Heintz contributed in Moscow, Liudas Dapkus in Vilnius, Lithuania and Geir Moulson and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin.
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