MINSK (Reuters) – The Belarusian top signaled on Wednesday called on Russia to help convince President Alexander Lukashenko to negotiate when she arrived for questioning in a criminal case accusing an opposition framework of an illegal attempt to seize the power.
“Now Lukashenko only communicates with Putin, we want him to communicate with people,” Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, said to the open-air journalists of the investigative committee, where she gave the impression of being questioned.
“Perhaps the global can help us, so lukashenko can negotiate with someone,” he said. “We want the help of the global and Russia.
She came out a short time later and claimed that she had invoked her right not to testify against herself, saying there is no basis for the investigation, adding: “The longer we are together, the more powerful we will be and the more likely we should get the government to speak. “
Alexievich is one of dozens of public figures who shaped the opposition Coordination Council last week, with the stated goal of negotiating a non-violent force transition after an election that the opposition says manipulated.
Lukashenko called him a takeover illegally. Two of its leaders were imprisoned on Tuesday.
At least 20 other people were arrested when police cleared Minsk Independence Square of lots of protesters Wednesday night, a Reuters witness said. Local media also reported arrests in Minsk and the city of Brest.
At the suggestion of the Coordinating Council, citizens also formed long queues in several districts of the capital to signal a petition calling for the resignation of legislators from a parliament that appears to stand firm before Lukashenko.
Rights teams said Belarusian police amassed dozens of protesters who returned home after non-violent protests on Tuesday, after days when the government was restrained in anti-government demonstrations.
Lukashenko has faced more than two weeks of massive protests against his 26-year reign since the elections, whose official effects he won with 80% of the vote. He denies electoral fraud and says that the protests are financed from abroad.
Although Lukashenko called the protesters “rats” and said he had given orders to evacuate them from the streets, the police had been relatively restrained in recent days, suspicious of a crackdown that would increase public anger.
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At the start of the demonstrations, police beat the protesters and many of the detainees came out with severe bruises and reported being mistreated in custody. In his comments prior to the interrogation, Alexievitch deplored the violence.
“For God’s sake, let no blood be shed, ” he said. “What we saw the first 3 days, when they turned other people into flesh, of the last century. “
The Spring defense organization has met more than 30 people who said they had been arrested on Tuesday. In a typical account, a man with a red and white opposition flag on his shoulder walking with his wife and young son when an unmarked car stopped. The organization said. Two men dressed in civilians jumped, drove the woguy and the boy, put him in the car and drove off.
The Interior Ministry said police arrested 51 other people for administrative violations after unauthorized meetings on Tuesday, and reporting dozens of arrests per day.
Belarus has the closest cultural, economic and political ties with Russia of all former Soviet states. Russia has shown its support for Lukashenko, adding that it sent the newscasts on state television after staff resigned in protest at what they described as orders to broadcast propaganda.
But it is noteworthy how long the Kremlin will be with Lukashenko if his authority continues to decline. He has a long non-public appointment with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A Russian government plane used to send senior government officials, the head of the FSB security service, landed in Minsk on Wednesday, according to flight tracking data.
It was his time for such a flight in just over a week. Reuters may simply not know who was on board.
(Report by Andrei Makhovsky in Minsk; Additional report through Vladimir Kostin in Minsk and Rinat Sagdiev in Moscow; Written through Peter Graff and Matthias Williams; Edited through Jon Boyle, William Maclean and Grant McCool)
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