The Belarusian regime, shame of Europe

Editorial of the “World”. A year ago, on August 9, 2020, at the end of a campaign that had given rise to mad hope, Belarusian voters expressed their desire for change. At least that’s what the polls and independent counts at polling stations indicated. The president they wanted to leave, however, did not intend to cede a power he had held unchallenged since 1994. He falsified the results. Since then, a fierce repression fell on the citizens of this former Soviet republic who dared to express their opposition to the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko.

This despot survives thanks to the support of Moscow, and in particular of its political police, the FSB, which provides invaluable support to its accomplice in Minsk, the KGB, remained faithful to the original. After realizing that force was not enough to crush the massive protest, the Lukashenko regime switched to more targeted methods. In one year, more than 35,000 people were arrested and passed through Belarusian jails, where torture and ill-treatment are frequent.

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The sentences are more and more severe. Journalists and intellectuals are being hunted down. Thus, one of the major figures of the protest, Maria Kolesnikova, a music teacher, was kidnapped in the middle of the street. As the police were about to deport her to neighboring Ukraine, she managed to jump out of the vehicle and tear up her passport to avoid deportation. The police then imprisoned her. His trial has just opened in Minsk; she faces twelve years in prison. The crackdown is so severe that exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya, whose husband is also in jail, has decided not to call a protest for the August 9 anniversary.

Series of sanctions

Lukashenko does not stop there. Its services are also active abroad against opponents who have fled the regime. In May, he diverted a Ryanair plane to Minsk to arrest an opposition journalist exiled in Vilnius (Lithuania) and present on board. On August 2, when a Belarusian athlete defected to Tokyo to escape a forced return after criticizing her team’s executives, another of her compatriots, Vitali Chichov, 26, was found hanged in a park in Kiev. . The young man was in charge of welcoming Belarusian refugees in Ukraine, where they would now number in the tens of thousands.

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Not content with persecuting its citizens, Lukashenko turned Belarus into a rogue state on the European continent. Today, he shamelessly wields the weapon of migration: Lithuania has for weeks been faced with a massive influx of asylum seekers from Iraq, Syria and Africa who arrive through the Belarusian border after having been flown to Minsk.

The European Union (EU) must defend itself. She no longer recognizes Mr. Lukashenko as the legitimate president and has given refuge to Svetlana Tsikhanovskaïa as well as to her exiled compatriots. It also took a series of sanctions against Minsk. It must continue in this direction, favoring measures which punish those responsible for repression and penalize the regime. It is also important that the United States and the United Kingdom, where the leader of the opposition in exile has just been received at the highest level, coordinate their action with that of the EU, for more efficiency.

But neither in Brussels, nor in London, nor in Washington, we must not lose sight of the fact that, behind this regime which has become the shame of Europe, it is President Vladimir Poutine who holds, in Moscow, the key to the fate of Alexander Lukashenko.

Read also the column: “A new iron curtain has risen in eastern Europe, where the logic of stagnation-repression freezes all political development”

Also listen In Belarus, opponents face torture and repression

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