Five days after Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed a landslide sixth electoral victory, the streets of Minsk resemble a war zone.
Damning evidence of electoral fraud to keep Lukashenko in power sparked nationwide protests by people who felt robbed of their democratic rights. The Aug. 9 vote itself had been preceded by the jailing of rival candidates, suppression of dissenting voices and control over the election apparatus.
Protesters were attacked by riot police and special forces of the Belarusian security agency, still called the KGB. They were beaten, detained en masse and beaten again behind bars.
Many of the detainees were kept for hours and faced torture in captivity. Protesters released from jail say they were denied medical assistance and kept in horrendous conditions without the right to make a phone call.
Overnight, Belarus turned from a peaceful dictatorship to a totalitarian police state where no one can feel safe leaving the house. With over 7,000 people detained, hundreds injured and at least two killed since the election, Belarus has descended into lawlessness.
People refuse to back down or stay inside. Women dressed in white are on the streets to demand the state release its prisoners. And state factory workers are refusing to work, proclaiming a nationwide strike in a nation whose economy is still largely in government hands.
Belarus journalist Konstantin Lashkevich says that the police crackdown, designed to instill fear, will “lead to the complete opposite result.”
Fraudulent election
Since the start of the presidential campaign, the Belarusian election has not been free or fair. Now, members of local electoral commissions are speaking up, saying they were forced to commit fraud.
Prior to the election, Lukashenko jailed his two main opponents. His third rival fled the country, fearing arrest.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of political blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, one of the two opposition leaders jailed prior to the vote, decided to run in her husband’s place. She then received the support of all three candidates barred from running.
Since then, she has led a successful campaign promising change to people fed up with dictatorship.
A homemaker and former teacher, Tikhanovskaya had no political experience prior to the election. Despite that, she managed to capitalize on many Belarusians’ desire to see Lukashenko gone.
Her platform is simple, but broadly popular. She promised to free dozens of political prisoner, hold fair presidential elections within sixth month and return the country to its more democratic 1994 constitution. Lukashenko replaced that constitution to give himself more power in 1996, just two years after he won election on a platform of democracy and economic prosperity.
According to the government’s preliminary election results, Lukashenko won over 80% of the vote. But an unofficial count suggested that Tikhanovskaya won the majority.
There is evidence that the unofficial count is right. A leaked video showed members of one electoral commission resisting government pressure to falsify results. Several electoral commissions that apparently did not engage in fraud posted results showing Tikhanovskaya receiving over 70% of the vote on average.
Exit polls conducted outside Belarusian embassies abroad gave her, on average, 90% of the vote.
As protesters took to the streets of cities across Belarusian cities, the government forced Tikhanovskaya to flee to Lithuania after a seven-hour interrogation. On Aug. 11, she recorded a short video explaining that she had been forced to leave the country.
“God forbid you be faced with such a choice as I have faced,” she said.
The United States, Lithuania, Poland, Germany and the European Union have all deemed the elections to be unfair.
State-sponsored brutality
After state-controlled exit polls declared Lukashenko the winner on the evening of Aug. 9, protests erupted across the country.
People began to line up in front of local election commissions, demanding a fair count. Soon, central squares in at least 33 Belarusian cities were crowded with people demanding change.
The riot police didn’t hold back. To suppress the protests, they fired rubber bullets, hurled flash grenades and used water cannon.
Multiple amateur videos shared online show riot police ganging up on unarmed individual demonstrators and beating them with truncheons.
Police even hunted down people walking near city centers and brutally attacked them.
In one instance, a man walking his dog and filming the protests from afar was shot by the police with rubber bullets, leaving a deep bloody wound on his hand.
The riot police blocks a street during a protest of opposition supporters after the Belarus’ presidential election, in Minsk on Aug. 9, 2020. (AFP)
In another video, police detained two young men, beat them with truncheons, placed them in a bus stop, and began firing at them with rubber bullets at close range.
Multiple videos have shown police officers vandalizing cars honking in support of protesters and beating women and children who peacefully protested detainees to be released.
On Aug. 11, the police in Brest, a city of 340,000 people, fired at protesters with live rounds.
Olga Chemodanova, spokesperson for Ministry of Interior of Belarus, said in an Aug. 12 statement that a group of aggressive citizens had attacked police officers and the police responded by shooting to kill.
“One of the attackers was injured,” Chemodanova said. She later edited her statement, which was published on the ministry’s website, to exclude the part about firing live rounds.
Documented torture
Once arrested, protesters have faced brutal torture in custody.
On Aug. 11, a state television channel showed six heavily beaten teenagers being interrogated by an officer at a police department. The visibly scared teenagers promise that they will not continue to prove a revolution.
Videos and reports of police torturing arrested protesters have flooded the internet.
Nikita Telizhenko, a Russian journalist for the independent Znak website, spent 16 hours in a detention center. He wrote a column describing the inhuman cruelty which protesters experienced there.
Telizhenko was arrested on Aug. 10, prior to the second night of protests. He was then moved to a detention center outside Minsk where he and other arrested protesters were brutally assaulted, forced to lie down on the floor in blood, urine and sweat and read the Bible.
The protesters were beaten and denied any external contact with lawyers or relatives.
“The man who was being led in front of me — the policeman deliberately hit his head on the doorknob,” Telizhenko wrote.
“When we entered the police department, it was (like) a carpet of people, lying down on the floor in their own blood,” he added.
Telizhenko said he saw unconscious people being taken out on stretchers. He does not know what happened to them.
Because the department was packed, people were lying down on top of each other in layers, he wrote.
Journalist Maksim Solopov, reporting for the independent Russian-language Meduza website, was kept behind bars for over 40 hours.
After he was released, Solopov said that he was beaten and thrown into an eight-person cell together with 40 other people.
“People were forced to stand on their knees (for hours),” said Solopov.
“We have tens, hundreds of similar reports,” says Lashkevich, “it’s absolute savagery and an atrocity.”
Telizhenko and Solopov are two of the many journalists detained by the Belarusian riot police. According to the Belarusian Journalists Association, a total of over 55 journalists were detained in four days.
Belarusian Journalist Liubou Luniova, who works for the Belsat TV channel, was arrested on Aug 12.
She told the Kyiv Post that, while she was interrogated, she saw a man heavily beaten, lying down face down with his hands tied behind his back. The man was losing consciousness and required immediate medical attention, she said.
“People are beaten, beaten, beaten until they lay unconscious,” Luniova said.
Many are still being kept behind bars, and a number of journalists haven’t been located days after being detained.
Aliaksandr Vichor, a 25-year-old man from Homel, died in a detention center due to heart failure. His mother said he had gone to meet his girlfriend and never returned.
Luniova believes that the official number of deaths is much lower than the actual number.
Nationwide strikes
Although the number of active protesters has fallen, people are now using other means to show their dissatisfaction with the regime.
Thousands are gathering in front of temporary detention centers to demand the release of their loved ones. In videos of these protests, the sounds of people screaming out in pain from behind the jail walls can be heard in the background.
In cities, people continue taking the streets to demand change.
Over 200 women dressed in white lined up holding hands on Pushkinskaya Street in Minsk, where the first protester was killed on Aug. 10. The women held flowers and demanded the release of political prisoners.
“Today is my birthday. I’m 26 today, but how can I celebrate when I have pain in my soul?” one woman said in a video recorded at the protest.
Women dressed in white clothes protest against police violence during recent rallies of opposition supporters, who accuse strongman Alexander Lukashenko of falsifying the polls in the presidential election, in Minsk on August 12, 2020. (AFP)
Medical workers held a peaceful protest demanding that police stop assaulting protesters. Previously, multiple amateur videos showed riot police using ambulances to catch protesters off guard. After protesters were injured and retreated, they called for ambulances, which turned out to be packed with riot policemen.
Medical workers across Belarus have been photographed with posters reading “Medics are with the people” and “Stop the violence.”
Even workers at state-owned factories, the economic backbone of Lukashenko’s regime, have gone on an indefinite strike demanding justice.
On Aug. 13, workers of the Minsk Automobile Plant (MAZ) and the Belarus Automobile Plant (BelAz), two of the country’s largest vehicle producers, gathered outside their workplaces to protest police brutality and electoral fraud.
In an amateur video from the MAZ plant, people are seen shouting “elections, elections!”
A day earlier, workers of a sugar factory in Zhlobino, the Minsk Tractor Works (MTZ), the Vasily Kozlov Minsk Electrical Plant and a number of other technical plants across the country came out in protest and went on strike.
Not backing down
Despite the country seemingly turning on him, Lukashenko isn’t ready to leave.
On Aug. 12, he held a meeting of the Security Council of Belarus where he hinted that he’s ready to pull out all the stops to maintain power.
Lukashenko called protesters “people with a criminal past” and “those who don’t have a job.”
While the Kyiv Post was speaking with Lashkevich by phone, he spotted seven military trucks packed with soldiers passing him in Minsk.
“It looks like we are on the verge of a civil war,” Luniova told the Kyiv Post.
Lashkevich doesn’t call it a civil war, but says that the situation is very bad.
“There isn’t a confrontation between those who support Lukashenko and those who oppose him,” he said. “There’s a confrontation between those in power and the majority of the country’s population.”
“The riot police were being prepared for exactly this moment,” he added.
