DM Monitoring
KYIV: Belarusian security forces searched the homes of journalists and human rights activists in several cities across the country on Tuesday, intensifying a crackdown on mass protests against veteran President Alexander Lukashenko.
Police searched the homes of 25 members of the independent Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) and the human rights organization Viasna-96, Viasna-96 said.
The authorities in a statement connected the searches to an investigation into what they said was the financing of the protests by “organisations positioning themselves as human rights defenders”.
More than 33,000 people have been detained in a violent crackdown following an election last August that Lukashenko’s opponents say was blatantly rigged to hand the president a sixth term in office since 1994. He denies electoral fraud.
The crackdown has prompted new Western sanctions but Lukashenko has refused to resign, counting on diplomatic and financial support from traditional ally Russia, which sees Belarus as a buffer state against the European Union and NATO.
“They are looking for ‘criminals’ among those who help political prisoners and write about the struggle of Belarusians for freedom,” wrote exiled opposition figure Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya about the raids.
“They look for ‘criminals’ in their parents’ homes. But in search of criminals, they should look into the offices of the riot police, the GUBOPiK (interior ministry directorate) and all those responsible for the repression.”
The raids came on the same day as the ongoing trial of two journalists from the Poland-based television channel Belsat in Minsk, who face up to three years in prison for reporting live from the protests.
Lukashenko held a two-day “People’s Assembly” last week to discuss political reforms, which his opponents dismissed as a sham exercise to keep him in power.
Moreover, tens of thousands of protesters out on the streets of Minsk week after week as summer turned into autumn, often enough with their children and pets in tow; women aged 18 to 80 facing off against masked riot police at women’s marches; a president in fatigues bearing an unloaded assault rifle in front of his presidential palace; and as autumn turned to winter smaller groups of protesters marching around their snowy neighborhoods.
Those are set to be the defining images of the most serious challenge to Alexander Lukashenko’s quarter century in office. By the summer of 2020 Belarusians had long come to expect unfair elections from their government. They had seen violent arrests and stun grenades used on the streets of Minsk after previous elections, but none of that had prepared them for what Belarusian political analyst Artyom Shraibman described to DW as a “level of brutality” unseen in the country since World War II.
After polls closed on August 9 amid widespread reports of ballot stuffing in favor of Lukashenko, tens of thousands of protesters went out onto the streets of Minsk and other major cities. The protests were big but not unprecedented in scale. Security services responded with extreme violence on the streets and in prisons.
What happened next constituted a “moral not a political protest” according to Artyom Shraibman, as hundreds of thousands of Belarusians came out to express their disgust at the government’s violent methods rather than the original vote rigging.
