Alexander Lukashenko is clearing the way before the legislative elections, scheduled for February 25. The authoritarian Belarusian leader has orchestrated in recent days a new wave of repression targeting former political prisoners and their relatives. Belarusian KGB security services have carried out nationwide raids. According to the Belarusian human rights NGO Viasna, more than 160 people were arrested, interrogated or had their homes searched. These searches aim “parents and relatives of political prisoners or former political prisoners who were recently released and remained in Belarus”affirmed the organization.
The police are particularly looking for traces of bank accounts abroad. The searches began on January 23 and are believed to be linked to aid provided by organizations in exile, which financially support the families of detainees, according to Viasna. Marina Adamovitch, wife of imprisoned activist Mikalaï Statkevich, was detained for fifteen days. Before her, Tatsiana Sieviaryniec, the mother of the opposition leader imprisoned Paval Sieviaryniec, was arrested and released pending trial in Vitebsk, although the charges against this 69-year-old woman remain unclear.
Belarus has more than 1,500 political prisoners, with new arrests occurring every day. Families are struggling to provide for the needs of their loved ones, detained in extremely rudimentary conditions. They say they spend at least $60 to $100 (55 to 90 euros) for each visit from a lawyer, and $158 per package of food and personal effects, while the average salary is around $582 monthly. Supporting a convicted prisoner can cost them more than $2,000 a year, Radio Liberty’s Belarusian service calculated.
The regime also opened an investigation, on January 25, into a group of independent Belarusian analysts who had taken refuge abroad and accused of plotting to seize power and promote extremism. “These are acts of intimidation, denounce to the World Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya. The regime wants to plunge Belarus into an information bubble before the so-called parliamentary elections”, estimates the leader of the opposition in exile, visiting the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on Tuesday. Faced with the scale of repression, the former 2020 presidential candidate calls on Belarusians “not to protest publicly, but to ignore the legislative elections”who does not “will change nothing about what is happening in the country”, the opposition having been pushed into exile or imprisoned.
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