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Movements Sep 29, 2020
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In a surprise ceremony on Wednesday, according to state media reports, embattled President Alyaksandr Lukashenko was sworn in for a sixth term after Belarus’s contested elections in August. Opposition leaders are calling the unannounced ceremony a “thieves’ meeting” and a “farce” and are urging condemnation of the action. Victoria Martinchik, a twenty-one-year-old attorney in Belarus, is fed up with years of authoritarian rule under Lukashenko. So she and family members have joined tens of thousands of their fellow Belarusians to protest what they consider to be a blatantly rigged August 9 presidential election. Belarusian political activists face a difficult situation, caught between a ruthless dictator and a potential Western takeover of their country. “We are tired of enduring this injustice,” she says in a phone interview from Minsk, Belarus’s capital city. For three days, “riot police threw grenades at us during the protests, beat people, and simply killed us.” For years, Lukashenko angered Belarusians by mismanaging the economy and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Conn Hallinan, an old friend of mine who works as a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus . “The demonstrations in the streets are genuine, not foreign-inspired, as claimed by Lukashenko,” says Hallinan […]
