Belarus – 300 Detained as Protest Against Lukashenko Continues

• The protesters are demanding the resignation of the country's President, Alexander Lukashenko whose recent controversial re-election was marred with widespread allegations of electoral fraud.
• Belarusian’s have continued to take to the streets every Sunday in Minsk, the capital of the country, and in other major cities such as Grodno, Brest, and Vitebsk.
• The Belarusian human rights organization Vesná has so far documented 327 arrests, the majority in Minsk.

Belarus was today just like the previous weekends in the recent past a scene of violent protests against the nation’s president, Alexander Lukashenko. During today’s protests, over 300 demonstrators were arrested. The protesters are demanding the resignation of the country’s President.

Alexander Lukashenko whose recent controversial re-election was marred with widespread allegations of electoral fraud.

For more than three months after the presidential elections, considered fraudulent by the opposition and the West, many Belarusian’s have continued to take to the streets every Sunday in Minsk, the capital of the country, and in other major cities such as Grodno, Brest, and Vitebsk.

In the face of mass arrests and police repression to prevent demonstrators from concentrating in the center of the capital, the opposition opted for a new tactic.

As per the new strategy dubbed; “neighborhood march”, small groups first meet in their neighborhoods, then formed columns in their districts, to protest against Lukashenko, who forcefully began serving for a sixth term after the August elections.

The opposition believed that this new way of protesting would make violent action by the Belarusian regime’s special intervention units more difficult since they would have to split up to go from district to district to detain the demonstrators.

However, the new tactic has today proven not effective in preventing the mass arrests nor police violence, and the use of tear gas and stunning grenades against peaceful protesters, based on images released by the independent portal TUT .by.

The Belarusian human rights organization Vesná has so far documented 327 arrests, the majority in Minsk.

Among the arrested is the economist and member of the opposition Coordination Council for the peaceful transfer of power, Dmitri Kruk, according to his colleagues at the Belarusian Center for Economic Research, cited by the portal.

Belarusian opposition leader in exile, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, in a video posted before the march in the Telegram mobile messaging application fully expressed her support for the ongoing demonstrations in the country and told off Lukashenko and his administration for oppressing Belarusians.

On Friday, the President of Belarus said he would stop leading the country after the approval of constitutional reforms, which he proposed to calm the protests against the Government, which have followed since the August presidential elections in the former Soviet republic.

“I will not work as president with you under the new constitution,” said Alexander Lukashenko during a visit to a hospital where coronavirus patients are treated as was quoted by the BELTA agency.

The Belarusian opposition called Lukashenko’s proposal “an imitation of democracy”, considering that the President was only trying to prolong his power and divert attention from the “stolen elections” that triggered the biggest protests in the country since the disintegration of the USSR in the early nineties.

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