Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 12 – Alyaksandr Lukashenka
clearly expected the he would be able to end the wave of protests against his
infamous Decree Number Three about the vagrants tax, but the result has been
just the opposite – “without politicians, flags or slogans,” Belarusians in
cities across the country are continuing to come together and make ever more
political demands.
Yesterday, anti-Lukashenka protests
took place in Pinsk and several other cities; today, the number and size of
protests has grown, despite or perhaps because of official efforts to block the
demonstrations by arresting potential leaders and sending out provocateurs,
according to Dmitry Galko of Belarussky Partisan (belaruspartisan.org/politic/373314/).
And because there are no fixed
leaders, the anger of Belarusians is not only intensifying but spreading with
demands now circulating not only for Lukashenka’s ouster but for the complete
lustration of all his officials down to the level of collective farm chairmen
and village political bosses.
“People are angry and have adopted a
decisive position,” Galko says; “they are tired of being afraid.” And they are
sharing their anger not only with each other but with journalists. Unlike in
the past, he says, he met no one in the crowds who was not willing to speak
with the media and to give his or her name.
The demonstrators
in Pinsk, mostly middle-aged or older but with many young people among them,
complained about rising prices for oil and gas, medicines that cost far more in
Belarus than in Poland, official efforts to confiscate chickens and other
animals so that people will have to buy in stores, and the shortage of
construction materials to build homes.
Some said that the Belarusian
constitution “must be holy like the Bible in church” and that leaders shouldn’t
be allowed to rewrite it or ignore it at will. Others said that they were fed
up with the lies on official television that everything is just fine. And a few
said it would be fine if Lukashenka would just fly away and never come back.
“Elderly people open called the
president ‘too old’” to remain in office and demanded that he and his team be
replaced by younger and more vigorous people, Galko continues. And ever more
Belarusians insisted that “we didn’t choose him.” Others did, and now he must
go and give way to new people in Minsk and throughout the country.
Earlier, many Belarusians were
uncertain about who would be in office if not Lukashenka, but “now this has
already become not so important: ‘All the same, it won’t be worse. But however
that may be, these people must be changed.’” And they laughed at the idea that
Lukashenka was backing down on the vagrants tax.
The Belarusian president may think
he can control the situation by the militia; but the crowds say they are no
longer intimidated by uniformed and undercover police and that in any case,
there are now so many demonstrations that Minsk doesn’t have enough militiamen
to send everywhere they might be needed.
At present, there are no obvious
leaders of this popular upsurge in anger, the journalist says; but “nature abhors
a vacuum” and some will emerge. And he
suggests that “they will turn out to be much more radical than the
representatives of the opposition. Therefore, the authorities are playing with
fire, committing one mistake after another.”
“All this already recalls Yanukovich’s
tactics,” Galko says, when the Ukrainian leader couldn’t adopt any sensible
policies but instead drove “the situation into a dead end, radicalizes protest,”
and ultimately led to his own flight from Kyiv.
Asked what would happen in Pinsk if
Lukashenka didn’t listen to the protesters and instead sought to suppress them,
one demonstrator said: “if they don’t listen to us, everything will be very bad”
because “we are very angry.”
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