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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including