A year after his tainted electoral victory, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko continues to use violence and intimidation against his opponents at home and abroad to cling to power.
But the opposition isn’t giving up hope that he can be pushed out.
“The fight took longer than we would like,” Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Lukashenko’s main rival during the August 9, 2020 presidential election, said in an interview with POLITICO. “But people don’t say we won’t succeed in the end, they just say it takes too long and it is not clear when it will end.”
A year ago, Tikhanovskaya led an unexpected alliance of three female politicians — with Maria Kolesnikova and Veronika Tsepkalo — that many Belarusians hoped would remove Lukashenko peacefully from the post he has occupied since 1994.
But Lukashenko claimed an 80 percent victory in a vote that is widely seen as fraudulent. Tikhanovskaya and Tsepkalo are in exile and Kolesnikova is on trial in Belarus, facing up to 12 years in prison.
Lukashenko rode out a wave of protests that shook the country after the election. The resistance on the streets faded over the winter and hasn’t regained strength in the face of arrests and sustained violence from security services loyal to Lukashenko.
“We believed there were so many of us [on the street] that we could prove to Lukashenko that he lost the election. This gave us hope that the regime would finally hear us, but it didn’t happen,” Tikhanovskaya said. “Moreover, the hell that the regime created — we were not ready for that.”
Crackdown
Lukashenko is showing no sign of loosening his grip.
All prominent opposition leaders have either been arrested or forced out of the country. Protesters have faced mass arrests. The regime is now rooting out the few remaining independent media operations and NGOs — including education institutions, human rights advocates and the local unit of the PEN-center headed by Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Aleksievich, who lives in exile in Germany.
In July, Lukashenko branded such NGOs “bandits” and “foreign agents.”
“A purge is underway,” he said. “Do you think it is easy? Thousands of people who have been brainwashed are working there.”
According to Belarusian human rights watchdogs, there are over 600 political prisoners in the country. Almost 30 journalists are behind bars.
In addition to cracking down at home, Lukashenko is showing increasingly little regard for international norms.
The authorities forced down a Ryanair airliner in May to arrest opposition blogger Roman Protasevich, who was flying from Athens to Vilnius. As a result, state airline Belavia has been banned from EU airspace and more sanctions were imposed on Belarus. In retaliation, Belarus is encouraging asylum applicants to fly to Minsk and then cross the EU border into Lithuania in what EU authorities say is an effort to “weaponize” migration.
Ukrainian police are investigating the death of Belarusian opposition activist Vitaly Shishov, who was found hanged near his house in Kyiv earlier this month.
The International Olympic Committee booted several Belarusian officials from the Olympic Village after they were implicated in attempting to force sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya back to Belarus after she criticized her coaches,
Despite the international backlash, Lukashenko’s retains a powerful ally in Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Lukashenko realized he is unable to cope with defiant Belarusians on his own and made a deal with … Putin,” said Andrei Kureichik, a prominent Belarusian playwright and film director, who joined the opposition Coordination Council, a body set up after the 2020 election to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.
He said Putin and Lukashenko are simultaneously stifling independent media, human rights activists and political opponents in their countries. “We can see how synchronized these processes are,” Kureichik told POLITICO. “Unfortunately, they share the methods of intimidation, repression and even political assassination or attempted assassination.”
“The lack of legitimacy, deficit of popular support, fear of losing power and of being held accountable for crimes have pushed the authorities toward the worst possible scenario: Turning the country into a concentration camp and seeking a full protectorate with Russia,” added Kureichik, who lives in exile in Slovakia.
He said Shishov’s death in Ukraine means, “I am forced to take the matter of my safety very seriously, even in Europe.”
Signs of hope
Despite the drumbeat of grim news, Tikhanovskaya still holds out hope for change.
She said many grassroots communities — of medical professionals, journalists and sportspeople — have been created in Belarus over the past year to support those who have suffered from the crackdown.
“Such structures had never existed in Belarus before,” Tikhanovskaya said. “People want to help each other, they want to stay mobilized. The window of opportunity is not very wide, but people do what they can.”
In a sign of how the government’s intimidation can backfire, sprinter Tsimanouskaya, now in exile in Poland, ended her news conference in Warsaw saying: “We are running free, and Belarus will be free.”
The Lukashenko regime understands that people cannot be silenced by repression, as happened in the past, when “20 or even 100 people were jailed, and the rest were scared … No, this time the struggle continues,” Tikhanovskaya said.
She also pins her hopes on a new generation.
“The new generation has grown up. This is not a generation of our parents, many of whom have never been abroad. These [young] people never lived under the yoke of the Soviet Union. We can see the difference,” she said. “The new generation is not a generation of submissive people.”
But Lukashenko has his own plan. He wants a revamp of the country’s constitution to be approved in a February national referendum. It’s not clear what changes he wants to make, but many political experts interpret his confusing statements as a desire to create a new post for himself that will allow him to continue running the country, while putting in a figurehead as a new president.
Tikhanovskaya says that would be unacceptable.
“A new president should act not for the sake of his entourage, but for the sake of Belarusians. A new president should act according to the law, so people can feel respect for the state,” she said. “The whole system should be altered.”
After a pause, Tikhanovskaya added: “I don’t even think about such a scenario. If you think that he will not leave, that some other loyal person will replace him, then there is no incentive to move forward. Such thoughts simply kill motivation [to act] in every person”.