“I sit here,” Zulevsky said, while other protesters, many of whom waved red and white flags, the opposition flag, chanted at a rally last month. “Only cowards beat women!”
In a country whose strong president, Alexander Lukashenko, brazenly mocked women for being too weak for politics and told them that their position was in the kitchen, Belarusian women have become the face and driving force of a motion to overthrow a leader known as the last dictator. .
The effort may be running out, with Lukashenko refusing to cede strength even though tens of thousands of others continue to take to the streets of Minsk to protest every Sunday. But whether or not it succeeds in overthrowing it, the motion of protest has already damaged deep-seated gender stereotypes built for generations.
“Women are more powerful in this situation,” said Tatiana Kotes, a film maker and activist. “We had to take on a more important role. The dominant role of men in society has collapsed. “
The collapse began even before the presidential election on August 9, which Lukashenko claimed to have won overwhelmingly, prompting two months of near-uninterrupted protests. With apparent displeasure, Lukashenko faced an unforeseen challenge from a candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of a popular blogger who hoped to run but imprisoned before she could register as a candidate.
Lukashenko mocked her rival as a housewife, a gentle mother ill-equipped to talk about serious state up disorders with a veteran leader like him.
“She just cooked a tasty chop, maybe fed the kids, and the chop smelled good,” Lukashenko said in an interview a while before the election. “And now there is a need for a debate on some issues. “
In addition to her anger and perhaps dismay, the fact that the opposition, in the past led by men and prone to bitter internal disputes, had accumulated about 3 women: Tikhanovskaya, whom they supported as a candidate; Veronika Tsepkalo, wife of a possible candidate who fled the country to avoid arrest; and Maria Kolesnikova, the crusader manager of Viktor Babariko, a imprisoned banker who also hoped to challenge Lukashenko.
With all the main male opposition figures withdrawn from the race by arrest or flight abroad, Tikhanovskaya and his two colleagues carried out a strategic and successful campaign, organizing giant rallies across the country, while Lukashenko limited himself to visits to the Soviet style to factories and military bases. .
“In our first demonstrations, we were surprised to see the number of other people present,” Tsepkalo, 44, said in an interview. “It is a symbol of the unity of Belarusians opposed to dictatorship. “
Kolesnikova, the only woman to remain in Belarus after the election, granted heroin prestige when she broke her passport to thwart the government’s plan to deport her to Ukraine and imprison her.
The appearance of women in the motion of protest, unexpected for many and, for Lukashenko, an affront to the order of herbs, was based on a vital feature of the country’s national psychology that left the traumas of World War II, when a quarter of the population, basically men, was wiped out.
Olga Shparaga, feminist and professor of philosophy at the European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus, said the shortage of men left women to play a significant role in rebuilding the devastated country after the war ended in 1945. left even the greatest Belarusian misoginos aware of what women can achieve.
Memories of the war were kept alive and presented to young Belarusians without remembering the war or its consequences through Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature, who made the role one of the great themes of his work.
“After the war, we young women lived in a world of women,” Alexievich said at his 2015 Nobel Conference. “What I understand is that women spoke of love, not death.
But it would probably have been Lukashenko himself who inadvertently did more than anything else to promote the cause of feminism. Presenting himself as a classic Slavic “muzhik”, or a genuine man, Lukashenko mocked women with such abandonment that it has become a lively and brilliant misogyny raw film and simple target of attacks.
Sergei Chaly, a Belarusian political and economic analyst who worked with Lukashenko early in her political career in the 1990s, said Tikhanovskaya had made a sensible resolve to present he he hesing he he hes as “a woman who only wants her husband and children, but who has been selected. “Destination to play a political role. “
This has attracted the distrustful electorate of Lukashenko’s dominant and masculine taste in his 26 years in power.
“I was used to dealing with men through bullying and rudeness, but I didn’t paint with women,” Chaly said.
After her starring role in the campaign, it was only herbal that women join the protests that erupt after Lukashenko won 80% of the vote in the nine August elections. In the following days, the streets of the capital, Minsk, have become a dangerous area of confrontation. Thousands of protesters, mostly men, were arrested and beaten and tortured.
As the country risked violent conflict when teams of competitive youth took to the streets in search of revenge, women once returned were at the center. A small activist organization organized a demonstration so obviously nonviolent that, they calculated, even the top brutal police would hesitate to use force.
Hundreds of women came down hand in hand in Minsk’s central market, forming a human chain that obviously left the police as to how they deserve to react.
Publicly beating unarmed women risked shaming the law enforcement apparatus and leaving officials open not only to public condemnation but even to the punishment of their superiors.
“Our government is looking for organizers, but this concept was in the air, it was a feeling shared by all the women of Belarus,” said Irina Sukhiy, an activist who joined the women’s demonstration.
The day after the nonviolent end of the first women’s march, thousands of women took to the streets of Minsk and other cities in the country, Lukashenko, who hoped brute force would be enough to queer the protests, unbalanced and asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for help.
The prompt reaction to isolate the women leading the protests and drive them out of the country. More recently, masked police officers, many of whom were visibly embarrassed, have made mass arrests of female protesters, but most of the detainees were released. after taking his fingerprints and a photo. Even leaders, such as Sukhiy, were sentenced to several days of administrative arrest.
“They didn’t expect a woman to oppose them,” said Ksenia Fyodorova, 47, an entrepreneur and security activist. “We learned that they can only be countered in a way diametrically opposed to what they did. “
In statements to journalists in Berlin on Wednesday after the assembly, German Chancellor Angela Merkel Tikhanovskaya said the role women played in the uprising was as determined as it was unexpected.
“They are fighting for the long term of their young people,” he said. “They don’t need their young people to be slaves to this long-term formula. “
Faced with official brutality, he said, women responded with “peace and love. “As a broad smile spread across her face, she added: “Now Belarusian women are world famous, and that’s wonderful. “
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