Riot police in Belarus on Saturday bundled hundreds of women, including a great-grandmother who has become an icon of the protest movement, into vans as opposition marchers rallied in Minsk seeking an end to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s 26-year rule.
The protest was the latest in which Belarusian women have taken to the streets with flowers and flags.
The numbers detained on Saturday were far higher than the previous week’s rally. The women were seized by riot police in black uniforms and balaclavas as well as officers in khaki uniforms and plainclothes officers in masks.
Photo: AFP
Police blocked the women and began pulling them into police vans as they stood with linked hands, swiftly detaining hundreds, an Agence France-Presse journalist said.
Police lifted some women off their feet to remove them.
The Viasna rights group published online the names of 328 women detained, while police spokeswoman Olga Chemodanova told reporters that the number detained would be announced yesterday.
Police detained so many protesters that they ran out of room in vans, the opposition’s Coordination Council said.
About 2,000 women took part in the “Sparkly March,” wearing shiny accessories and carrying red-and-white flags of the protest movement.
Among those detained on Saturday was Nina Baginskaya, a 73-year-old advocate who has become one of the best-known faces of the protest movement, known for her plucky antics and regularly celebrated with a chant of “Nina! Nina!”
Police took away the flag and flowers she was carrying as they pushed her into a van, but released her outside a police station shortly afterward.
The march was the latest in a series of all-women protests calling for the president to leave following his disputed victory in elections last month.
His opposition rival Svetlana Tikhanovskaya also claimed victory.
Tikhanovskaya, who has taken shelter in Lithuania, condemned the “arbitrary” detentions, saying that police without any identifying badges had “roughly detained en masse beautiful and brave women who were protesting lawfully and peacefully.”
The Coordination Council, set up by Tikhanovskaya’s allies to arrange a peaceful handover of power, described the detentions as “a new phase in the escalation of violence against peaceful protesters.”
Tikhanovskaya said that protesters were ready to strip riot police who carry out “criminal orders” of anonymity.
The Poland-based opposition Telegram channel Nexta published a list of more than 1,000 names and ranks of alleged police offenders, saying that it received the data from whistle-blowers and would post more if detentions continued.
Witness accounts of police violence and torture of detainees following the elections have prompted the European Parliament to call for sanctions against Lukashenko and other members of his regime.
The marchers chanted slogans such as “Get out, you and your riot police!” and “We believe we can win!”
One of the placards read: “Our protest has a woman’s face,” a reference to the title of a popular book by the Belarusian Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, who has backed the opposition cause.
“I will march to the end, until we claim victory, because we are in the right,” said one protester, Irina, a 50-year-old programmer.
Some women managed to run away and took shelter in a nearby nail salon, Tut.by news site reported.
The protest came as the opposition was due to hold mass demonstrations yesterday afternoon in Minsk and other cities.
Tikhanovskaya is to meet EU foreign ministers and the bloc’s diplomatic chief in Brussels today, in a move that Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova condemned as “flirting with a self-appointed representative of the Belarusian opposition.”
The women’s protests began in Belarus after Lukashenko’s use of extreme violence against detained demonstrators.
Women began forming human chains and marching through Minsk and other cities wearing white clothes and carrying flowers in peaceful demonstrations that police initially allowed to go ahead.
Last weekend, police violently detained several dozen at a similar women’s protest.
Lukashenko last week warned of a possible “war” with some neighboring countries and has turned to Russia for support after refusing to step down.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.