David Pratt: It's backs to the wall in Belarus as stand-off intensifies

Undaunted, the people of Belarus continue to protest in unprecedented numbers, refusing to be cowed by state violence. According to Lukashenko, these are attempts to orchestrate a coup.

But the question many are now asking is whether what we are witnessing is the beginning of another “colour revolution”, one with the potential to topple the post-Soviet ruler?

Speaking on Friday, Belarusian opposition politician Svetlana Tikhanovskaya who was forced to leave Belarus right after the vote, said she would return to the country when she felt it was safe to do so.

At a news conference in Lithuania, Tikhanovskaya said the people of Belarus wanted a new election to be held that would be free and fair. If events in the Belarusian capital Minsk these past days are any indicator, then Tikhanovskaya’s assessment of what many of her fellow countrymen and women want is correct.

Just when, though, it would be safe for the opposition leader to return to Belarus, perhaps injecting fresh impetus into opposition protests, is another matter entirely.

Earlier on Thursday, the Belarusian authorities opened a criminal probe against opposition activists who set up what it called a Co-ordination Council to negotiate the transition of power.

The Belarusian prosecutor general’s office said the creation of the council violated the constitution and opened a criminal inquiry against its founders on charges of threatening national security.

“The creation and the activities of the Co-ordination Council are aimed at seizing power and inflicting damage to the national security,” prosecutor general Alexander Konyuk was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.

The council consists of top associates of Tikhanovskaya as well as rights activists and representatives of striking workers. It also includes the nation’s most famous author, Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In tandem with the criminal probe, the regime has again also beefed up a security presence on the streets of the capital, blocking access to some government buildings and deploying police and paramilitaries in numbers outside major factories where workers have been on strike since early last week.

“There should no longer be any disorder in Minsk of any kind,” Lukashenko instructed his security officials, indicating he has no intention of backing down from his 26-year rule, one of the world’s longest.

“People are tired. People demand peace and quiet,” Lukashenko added. He also confirmed that border controls had been tightened to prevent an influx of “fighters and arms”, again implying that some kind of armed coup attempt was in the making.

One challenge Lukashenko is undoubtedly facing though has come from sections of the country’s state-controlled media on whom the autocrat has long relied to shape public opinion. In the past week, hundreds of employees of state television have gone on strike. Journalists from the leading state-owned daily newspaper, Zvyazda, also joined their broadcast colleagues and put out a statement demanding an end to censorship.

Vyacheslav Lomonosov, one of the Belarusian TV employees who joined the strike, said he and his colleagues could no longer tolerate an official ban on reporting the truth about the regime’s crackdown on protesters

“There are people killed, raped, thousands are protesting, while they’re saying everything’s fine in the country and nothing is going on,” said Lomonosov.

“It can’t be like that, people need to get the truth from TV,” the Associated Press reported him as saying.

In the first days of the protests following the election, security forces and police deliberately targeted journalists from independent Belarusian news outlets and foreign media, detaining scores, beating some of them, damaging their equipment, and seizing memory cards.

Boris Goretsky, vice-president of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, confirmed the 72 journalists were detained while covering the protests.

But it has been ordinary Belarusians who have borne the brunt of the crackdown with at least three reported killed and over 7,000 arrested.

According to human rights organisations, the fates of many remain unknown two weeks after the election, feeding fears that the authorities are deliberately covering up severe injuries, or worse, carried out by the security forces.

Online search services have been organised to help families locate their missing loved ones, according to Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty RFE/RL.

One of them, launched by the popular independent media outlet Tut.by with the title Have You Seen This Person? enables people to post images and information about the missing and the circumstances of their disappearance so readers can contribute information or assistance in the search.

People can also turn to the Angel Search and Rescue Squad, a non-profit group set up in 2012 that describes itself as the first volunteer movement in Belarus. Its Facebook page features a hotline for readers to call with information about missing individuals.

Last week, RFE/RL cited one report by the Angel group posted August 18 on Facebook. It concerned missing museum director, 29-year-old Kanstantsin Shyshmakou, who the group says was found dead by members of its team, though it provided no other details of the circumstances.

Shyshmakou is said to have been one of two members of his local election commission in the southwestern Belarusian city of Vawkavysk, who refused to sign off on the results of the August 9 election vote.

The Belarus police and Interior Ministry have questioned the veracity of such accounts provided online. In a statement, ministry spokeswoman Volha Chamadanova insisted that such information often turns out to be inaccurate.

“The criminal police of the Interior Ministry have checked the information regarding more than 70 participants of the unsanctioned rallies (held in the country from August 9 to 13) that has been published on the website Tut.by and in various social networks,” Chamadanova wrote.

“This information is not fully accurate: many of these citizens have been found at home, while the information about them is not removed in a timely fashion from these internet resources.”

But last week, in accounts given to Deutsche Welle (DW), the German public international broadcaster, several Belarusian women detailed their harrowing experiences during detention and accused the authorities of inflicting torture.

One of the women, Olga Pavlova, was a campaign staffer for opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and was detained for five days. In an interview with DW, Pavlova describes how she was put into a van, filled with other people detained, and sent to prison.

“The men were immediately beaten. There was a Russian woman with us. She demanded access to the Russian ambassador, but she was taken into a neighbouring cell and beaten. They told her she would never return home,” Pavlova recounted.

She described how she ended up in a cell designed for four but was packed with 36 people. When the prisoners asked for a window to be opened, two buckets of water were dumped on them. Those in the cell, she says, nearly suffocated on the evaporating moisture. One of the prisoners suffered from epilepsy, another from diabetes, the DW interview cited her as saying. Pavlova herself had been injured by rubber bullets and stun grenades while working to provide first aid to protesters on the streets.

Faced with such intimidation and given what many say is the lack of clarity about what to do next, some observers believe the opposition movement could be seriously undermined. Others point to signs that the momentum of factory and industrial strikes could be waning.

According to Sergey Dylevskiy who represents strikers at the giant Minsk tractor plant (MTZ), about 20% of workers at the plant are on strike. The rest are too afraid to leave their jobs and support the movement, he said.

But other opposition activists insist the lack of any centralised leadership is not a weakness. “We’re witnessing a unique situation when protests are decentralised and spontaneous,” Maria Kolesnikova, a prominent opposition figure told the BBC in Minsk.

“I wouldn’t say that in order to continue the protests, we must have a leader.”

Without a clear figurehead, however, it remains uncertain whether the opposition can effectively mobilise those that take to the streets. It raises question, too, whether what we are witnessing is indeed another “colour revolution” on a par, say, with what happened in Ukraine.

Some regional watchers are wary of such comparisons.

“Many commentators are comparing the situation in Belarus to Ukraine’s Orange and Maidan revolutions in 2004/05 and 2014 respectively,” insists Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden who also previously served as the UN’s special envoy for the Balkans. “But Belarus is not Ukraine, and nor is it particularly helpful to apply the Maidan model to the scene playing out in Minsk and other Belarusian cities and towns.”

Writing in a recent article for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Bildt highlights how the Maidan movement was a direct response to the Ukrainian government’s attempt to abandon the cause of European integration and reform.

The revolutionaries there openly mobilised under the banner of the European Union. In Belarus’s case, says Bildt, domestic concerns are clearly playing the “more salient role, and questions about the country’s orientation vis-a-vis Europe or Russia are almost totally absent”.

Rather than draw parallels with Ukraine, in Belarus’s case, Bildt points to the situation being analogous with Armenia in spring 2018 when mass demonstrations led to the resignation there of longtime president Serzh Sargsyan and inaugurated a new democratic era for the country.

But other players are closely watching what is unfolding in Belarus, not least Russia and its president Vladimir Putin, himself no fan of colour revolutions and who has warned European leaders against “unacceptable meddling” in the political crisis in Belarus.

Last week, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s intention of protecting its influence over its longtime client state.

“What is happening in Belarus worries us very much  ...No-one is making a secret of the fact that this is about geopolitics, the fight for the post-Soviet space,” Lavrov insisted.

In all, Russia faces a bit of a dilemma over Belarus. That quandary was summed up on Thursday in a Financial Times article that asked the crucial questions as to how Moscow can “maintain control when the dust settles, and through who?”.

This is complicated further by the fact that while relations between Lukashenko and Putin have often been strategic, they have not exactly always been cordial.

“The best option for the Kremlin now is not to sit and wait but to prepare for and manage a succession away from Lukashenko to a regime that would rely, in electoral terms, on the pro-Russian majority of Belarus,” was how Dmitri Trenin, head of think tank the Carnegie Moscow Centre summed up the possible way forward for the Kremlin to the FT.

But right now, of course, Belarus is not the only thing on Moscow’s mind. There is also the outcry over the alleged poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, a foe of Putin and a campaigner against corruption who has arrived in Germany from Siberia for treatment.

Back in Belarus though it is the standoff between the regime and opposition that all eyes are focused on. As its stands, some see Lukashenko as having three options.

One is wearing down the opposition through intimidation and arrests, though on that front he appears up against it given the scale of protests.

Second, he could resort to martial law. Last but not least, he might call on Moscow’s help. Which course of action he takes will in great part be determined by what the opposition does next and that remains a difficult call for those on the streets of Minsk.

“I think that every person in our country feels fear and is scared now,” said Svetlana Tikhanovskaya at a press conference in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on Friday. “But it is our mission to step further over our fear and move further,” she pleaded to supporters.

The question now. however, is whether Tikhanovskaya herself is prepared to do just that and return to Belarus. Either way this crisis is only just getting started.