(Reuters) – Thousands of academics boycotted the start of school in Belarus on Tuesday and the symptoms of a imaginable breakup gave the impression of an opposition alliance that spawned weeks of demonstrations and protests against veteran President Alexander Lukashenko.
Lukashenko faces the greatest challenge of his 26-year reign since he won an election last month that the parties to the conflict say were manipulated. Lukashenko denies voter fraud and shows no symptoms of retreating despite the risk of Western sanctions.
The United States is punishing seven other people who are reportedly concerned about election manipulation and violence against protesters, a senior U. S. State Department official told Reuters.
“It’s a minimal effort for Array . . . not only to denounce and shame, but to show that when others take advantage of elections and engage in violence in opposition to nonviolent protesters exercising basic freedoms of assembly and expression, there will have to be some responsibility,” he added. said the official.
In a rare public rebuke, Lukashenko’s main rival, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, criticized the strategy of some other opposition organization with which he formed an alliance during the election campaign.
Tsikhanouskaya fled into exile two days after the elections of August 9. From her new base in Lithuania, she declared hes he/she the valid winner and introduced an opposition council with the stated goal of ensuring a movement of nonviolent power.
Tsikhanouskaya said the council “must be governed through any political party,” after opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova and the team of imprisoned presidential candidate Viktor Babariko announced the creation of a party called “Together. “
The stated purpose of the Babariko and Kolesnikova countryside of enacting constitutional reform is a distraction from the purpose of isolating Lukashenko and holding new elections, Tsikhanouskaya said.
The Kolesnikova camp later said that it needed to alter the council’s paintings and supported Tsikhanouskaya’s call for new elections and its electoral program.
“No single Belarusian doubts Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s victory, and that her victory was stolen,” she said.
“THE SUMMER OF EVENTS IS OVER”
Many public schools were used as polling stations and teachers helped count election ballots, which the electoral commission said Lukashenko had won with a voting percentage of 80%.
In response to a call from Tsikhanouskaya, academics waving opposition flags made marches and amassed signatures in front of several Minsk schools asking Lukashenko to resign.
Video images show students, some with backpacks, being dragged away from a crowd and held by masked security forces. Police also arrested seven journalists covering the protests for what the government described as document checks.
Further protests also took place in two of the commercial factories that underpin Lukashenko’s Soviet-style business model, the Minsk wheel tractor factory and the Minsk tractor factory, local media reported. Protested.
Thousands more were arrested after the election and UN human rights investigators said Tuesday that they had won reports of heaps of torture, beatings and ill-treatment cases.
He has denied abusing the detainees.
Lukashenko tried to put a limit on protests by visiting a vocational education school.
“The president is under pressure for the end of the hectic summer,” belta’s official news firm said.
Lukashenko described the protesters as “rats” supported from the outside. On Monday, a third member of the opposition council was arrested.
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia imposed bans on Lukashenko and 29 other officials. The European Union has been on a list of Americans who will be targeted by sanctions, but deserve to exclude Lukashenko.
Belarus is Russia’s closest closest friend among the former Soviet states, and its territory is an integral part of Moscow’s European defense strategy.
Russia has expressed its readiness to Lukashenko’s government and the two countries are discussing the refinancing of Belarusian debt, the news firm Interfax reported.
(Additional report via Arshad Mohammed and Jonathan Landay in Washington, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Maria Kuallyova in Moscow and Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; written through Matthias Williams, edited through Peter Graff and Timothy Heritage)
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