BERLIN (Reuters) – The leader of the Belarusian opposition, Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya, on Tuesday visited a fragment of the Berlin Wall before an assembly with Chancellor Angela Merkel and said she saw it as a symbol of the transformation she sought to achieve in her own country.
Tsikhanouskaya, who says he won the Belarusian presidential election two months ago and accuses President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in force for 26 years, of clinging to force through major electoral fraud, is in Berlin seeking support.
Hundreds of thousands of people have spoken out on the streets of Belarusian cities since the election, defying brutal police repression and widespread violence to call for Lukashenko to pave the way for a new vote.
At a 45-minute singles meeting with Merkel, Tsikhanouskaya said she hoped Germany would offer investments to independent media and civil society, according to a post on her Instagram account.
“The first thing I did in Berlin to take a look at the Berlin Wall,” he said of the design launched by east German’s communist regime in 1961 to prevent East Germans from fleeing their Soviet-backed government to democratic West Germany.
The fragments of the wall remain scattered throughout the city, many of which are decorated with political graffiti, as they were in the aspect of West Berlin the 28 years in which the city was divided.
After talking to reporters, he went to a play at Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz Station, which activists had painted in Belarusian national colors in red and white as part of the protests.
“I showed an image of other people in the east-looking state on the wall,” he said, referring to the scenes after the collapse of east German rule in 1989. “It’s the same in Belarus: we’re on this wall and they’re going to tear it down.
(Report via Thomas Escritt; edited through Alexandra Hudson and Gareth Jones)
Subscribe
Sign up for our news explosion.