Hundreds of calls to the authoritarian president to resign demonstrated in the Belarusian capital on Saturday, proceeding to large-scale protests that have rocked the country since early August.
Police blocked the centre of Minsk and arrested more than 80 protesters, according to the human rights organization Viasna. Some of those arrested were chased by police in the courtyards of the buildings where they sought refuge, Viasna said.
The protests, by far the largest and most persistent in Belarus since the independence of the Soviet Union in 1ninenine1, began on 9 August after an election that, according to officials, gave President Alexander Lukashenko a sixth term.
Opponents and some elections say the results, in which Lukashenko gained 80% support, were manipulated.
Despite the large-scale arrests of protesters and the arrest of many opposition figures, the protests showed no signs of slowing down, Lukashenko enraging the warring parties this week by taking the oath of a new term in an unforeseen ceremony.
Protesters carried banners on Saturday who denounced him as “the secret president. “
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, lukashenko’s opponent of the election who went into exile in Lithuania after the vote, congratulated the protesters and mocked the police in a statement.
“And the men themselves, who hide their faces, use force in front of women?Is it imaginable to live in peace with such men? She.
Lukashenko will deliver a video to the United Nations General Assembly later on Saturday. His statements are likely to fuel Sunday’s protests, which were the biggest of the week and attracted some 200,000 crowds.
Lukashenko, former director of collective farms, has been in 1994, meanwhile, suppressed opposition and independent media and kept the country’s economy under Soviet-style state control to the fullest.