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Belarus: Where's the Solidarity of Western Feminists?

2020-09-23T19:28:55.067Z


Women shape the protest in Belarus. But where is our solidarity? Isn't this fight cool enough for western feminism?


Icon: enlarge

Protest in Minsk (on September 19)

Photo: EPA-EFE / Shutterstock

The news is clear: Belarus has had a peaceful revolution for a month.

It is heartbreakingly simple in its desire - the fraudulent elections are to be repeated and the political prisoners released.

The president, who has been the sole ruler for over a quarter of a century, should be ready for talks with civil society.

Workers strike the factories just as the philharmonic orchestra and actors strike state houses;

many IT companies in the country - an important and prestigious branch of the economy for the regime - oppose Lukashenko.

Tens of thousands of people demonstrate again and again in the capital Minsk, but citizens also take to the streets in other places.

They hook themselves under, many wearing white and red, the colors of the opposition, and holding flowers in their hands.

No cobblestones, no weapons, no hand grenades.

They present signs they have painted themselves, and when they use them to climb onto one of the benches, as they are in Belarus on the streets and in the squares, they sometimes take off their shoes so as not to dirty the public goods.

They do flash mobs where they sing.

One hears and sees nothing of broken windows, of looting, of destruction - which it would only be in the interests of the regime to show.

An elevation with a female face

It is an almost unprecedentedly peaceful and worthy elevation.

In many scenes it reminds of the sit-ins in the USA during the days of Martin Luther King, when students, many black, some white, allowed themselves to be spit at and beaten up in milk bars and burger restaurants to demonstrate: We are human and have rights .

There is a second special feature: this peaceful, disciplined and creative elevation has a feminine face.

The demonstrators wear sneakers and make-up, they carry handbags or shopping bags, cool biker jackets and practical coats, they are young or as old as 73-year-old Nina Baginskaja, already a dissident during the Soviet era, who said, "I'm going for a walk "carries the white-red-white flag of the opposition past the men in uniform.

Apparently spontaneously, but guided by a common consciousness, they form a human shelter around demonstrating men.

They press against each other and hold on tight, making the male demonstrators harder to reach for the "security forces".

The "security forces" are uniformed soldiers and policemen from Belarus, equipped with hard hats and visors, with firearms, batons and Plexiglas shields that protect them from the flowers.

On the other hand, it is men who, equal to hooligans, encircle and then attack the groups of women who use their unarmed bodies to protect their fellow citizens;

they cut aisles and drag individuals out of the peaceful protective wall, who are then dragged into a dark minibus.

But women also take them with them.

A few days ago it should have been more than 300.

The opposition presidential candidate Svetlana Tichanowskaja recently presented a photo to EU foreign ministers in Brussels that shows a tortured body with bruises and welts;

Countless photos like this are circulating on the internet.

Something must be missing

There is no doubt at all that the movement in Belarus is largely carried out by women.

Not only at the top, from the three icons of the revolution, Svetlana Tichanowskaja, Marija Koleskinowa and Weronika Zepkalo, who are now in exile or in prison.

Not only from the Nobel Prize winner for literature, Svetlana Alexijewitsch, who is no longer available to Western media.

But especially on the street.

There is no doubt that here women from all educational backgrounds, women of all ages are endangering - and losing - their security, their comfort, their careers and their integrity for all that the West preaches: self-determination, freedom, justice.

Or, to put it more modestly: a life in a country where elections are not falsified, prisoners are not tortured, people are not terrorized.

Icon: enlarge

Protesters face "security forces"

Photo: Valery Sharifulin / ITAR-TASS / imago images

But they're doing something wrong.

Something must be missing.

Because they remain strangely alone with their protest.

No big hashtag for the

women of Belarus

, no spectacular actions in front of the Belarusian embassy buildings in the democratic states of Europe.

No fire of enthusiasm, no heat in the otherwise exciting discourse.

No solidarity imitation actions like those initiated by the bosomed "Femen", no admiring echo like the Russian pussy riot activists received.

No loud support for feminist academics who are ready with so much patience and energy to split any straight or politically deliberately frizzy hair when it comes to the correct use of personal pronouns, pink-colored armpits or perceived discrimination.

No Zadie Smith, no Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, no Judith Butler, no Beyoncé who would utter a word to the Sisters, Ladies & Bitches, who protest in Minsk with tremendous courage.

Susan Sontag, who presumably would have gone to help these women, is no longer alive.

We have parquet under our feet, and they don't even have solid ground

And in rich, saturated Germany there is no prominent feminist to insert a word of solidarity or at least to start a fundraising campaign.

But also no voice can be heard from the east of the republic with what helped a good thirty years ago in Germany to grasp the wheel of history: solidarity, publicity and encouragement.

Even if nothing can be done in realpolitical terms: moral pressure could help.

And the experience that the well-off and undamaged are not indifferent in the democratic world can raise the soul.

That Lukashenko speaks of women like the bad grandpa in the Germanic nightmare (they like to cook and look nice and leave the important stuff to the men) - isn't that enough for feminist support?

A sexist and brutal patriarchy, doesn't that trigger enough?

Or is the East, again, not cool enough?

Does it have to be blatant performances that quote ironically whatever works (bare breasts, punk, young protagonists)?

Could it be that western feminism, long in the executive suite of power to ensure quota for supervisory boards, or busy with discursive petitess, no longer sees the political when it is as simple as it is here?

The women in Belarus are fighting for the foundation on which we have long been standing.

We have parquet under our feet, and they don't even have solid ground.

Until a few weeks ago, Belarus was called "the last dictatorship in Europe" with some complacency.

Now women are shaking them.

And stay alone with it.

The slogan "I am a feminist", so extremely popular in the democratic West and enriching cultural capital, is now getting a cynical touch.

Icon: The mirror

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2020-09-23

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