Svyatlana Zichanouskaya had no intention of challenging a brutal dictatorship.
The story behind the resistance against Lukashenko.
Belarusian ruler Lukashenko is brutal against the opposition.
But after years of his almost unlimited power, there is now public opposition.
The focus here is particularly on the non-party civil rights activist Swjatlana Zichanouskaja, who ran in the 2020 presidential election.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published on August 6, 2021 by the magazine "Foreign Policy".
Svyatlana Zichanouskaja paces restlessly back and forth in her apartment in the Belarusian capital Minsk.
She was packing for exile, but she could hardly think clearly.
The former teacher Zichanouskaja, who had given up her paid job to raise her two children, ran against the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in an election the day before.
Lukashenko is one of the most brutal dictators in the world and has been in power for 27 years.
I. The exile
Nobody expected a free and fair race in this country, where elections have long been more symbolic than substantive.
But nobody expected that the election would free Belarus * from its paralysis.
In the weeks leading up to the August 9, 2020 election, thousands of people took part in rallies in support of Zichanouskaya.
Such scenes were previously unthinkable.
On election night, when it became clear that the election had once again been rigged, tens of thousands of people poured onto the streets of cities across the country.
The internet was switched off and the main roads into the capital were closed.
Stun grenades, water cannons and rubber bullets were used to disperse the crowds.
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Alexander Lukashenko (l), President of Belarus, takes part in a joint strategic military exercise of the armed forces of Russia and Belarus, together with other members of high-ranking military personnel.
© dpa
The day after the election, Zichanouskaya went to the country's central electoral commission in central Minsk to question the official result, according to which Lukashenko had been re-elected with almost 80 percent of the vote. For almost three hours, two security guards tried to force her to leave the country immediately by showing her in a vivid way what would happen if she stayed. They vividly described the fate of women in the country's prisons, where they swore that they would remain imprisoned for years. Her son and daughter, then 10 and 4 years old, would be taken into custody by the state. And in Belarus this is not an empty threat, because the authorities are known for taking children away from mothers who are critical of the regime,to silence them. At the beginning of the summer Zichanouskaja had already sent her children to neighboring Lithuania, but feared the Belarusian state would get hold of them there too. Her thoughts turned to her son Karniei, who was born almost deaf. Since he was born, she fought for the best care for him and moved with the von Gomel family to Minsk in southeastern Belarus so that he could receive the best possible treatment. "At that moment, the mother in me got the upper hand," she explained in an interview withSince he was born, she fought for the best care for him and moved with the von Gomel family to Minsk in southeastern Belarus so that he could receive the best possible treatment. "At that moment, the mother in me got the upper hand," she explained in an interview withSince he was born, she fought for the best care for him and moved with the von Gomel family to Minsk in southeastern Belarus so that he could receive the best possible treatment. "At that moment, the mother in me got the upper hand," she explained in an interview with
Foreign Policy
during her recent trip to Washington.
If Zichanouskaja would leave the country, it would only be for something in return.
She tried to get her husband, Sjarhej Zichanouski, released from prison.
The former businessman and successful anti-government video blogger had been jailed since May.
Zichanouskaja had registered for the election in order to support her husband, with whom she has been married for 15 years and who was no longer allowed to run.
She never expected it to come to this.
But they could not achieve the release of Zichanouski.
How about her chief of staff Maria Moroz, who had been arrested in front of her just a few days earlier?
Chief of Staff Maria Moroz describes the “war zone” in Minsk
At the other end of town, in the infamous Okrestina prison camp, Moroz experienced her own nightmare. Tens of thousands of Belarusians would be imprisoned in the weeks following the election, but blood had already flowed in Okrestina. Just one day after the election, the prison camp struggled to cope with the influx of prisoners. The protesters' personal belongings and backpacks were strewn on the floor, and their unsupervised cell phones rang in confusion.
After two days behind bars, a guard took Moroz down from her overcrowded cell to meet senior Belarusian security officer Nikolay Karpenkov. (Karpenkov was later sanctioned by the United States for his role in cracking down on the protests.) Moroz feared she would be taken away and tortured. Instead, she was put in an expensive car and driven around Minsk. After a night of turmoil, the normally immaculate city was already unrecognizable, a "war zone," Moroz said in a Zoom interview with
Foreign Policy
.
Moroz was taken to Zichanouskaja's apartment, where the two women, who had got to know each other better during the election campaign, lived together in the weeks leading up to the election. “Every day was filled with fear,” Zichanouskaja remembers that time.
"I'm not going back to prison," said Moroz when they met again in the apartment, and the two women decided to leave the country together. The presidential candidate just packed her passport and equipment for her son's cochlear implant while Moroz called her sister to take her children, who were then 13 and 2 years old, to the border with Lithuania. They were driven through town to collect the Moroz car they were going to use to leave the country. On the way they saw the many demonstrators, and both women were overcome by a “wild desire”, according to Zichanouskaya, to jump out of the car and join the crowd. But her thoughts quickly returned to her children.
Before getting into Moroz's car, the women made one final condition. Fearing that the security services might have placed a bomb in the vehicle, they insisted that an agent from the Belarusian KGB accompany them in their car on the 150-kilometer journey to the Lithuanian border that night. Zichanouskaya lay in the back seat of the car while Moroz, who couldn't remember the last time she had slept or had something to eat, talked to the KGB agent in the front seat during the journey. People just want their votes to be counted fairly, she explained. He agreed with a lot of what she had to say. "Maybe he only agreed because he was hostage in my car," Moroz remarked jokingly.
Violence in Belarus: activist stabs ballpoint pen in the throat - for fear of "pressure chamber"
More than 35,000 people have been arrested since the election day protests began. Reports of torture in the country's prisons quickly emerged. Detainees reported beatings, electric shocks, rape and long periods in stressful positions to human rights organizations. In June, activist Stepan Latypov stabbed himself in the neck with a ballpoint pen in a courtroom after police officers threatened him that if he did not confess, they would throw him into the "hyperbaric chamber" - a cell in which hardened criminals did Make common cause with the authorities, beat political prisoners into submission. Today there are more than 600 political prisoners behind bars, most of whom were arrested after the elections and often face long sentences.Thousands of Belarusians have fled the country.
The brutality of the regime is spreading increasingly across national borders. Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya was forced to cancel the Tokyo Olympics * and flew to Poland in early August, where she was granted asylum after Belarusian officials tried to force her to return home for publicly criticizing the team's coaches. In a separate incident, Belarusian activist Vitaly Shishov was found hanged in a park in Kiev in early August. The Ukrainian police have opened a criminal investigation into whether Shishev died from suicide or what was supposed to be a murder that was supposed to be suicide. Shishov headed Belarusian House, an organization that helps exiles adapt to life in Ukraine.In a post in the encrypted social media app Telegram, the group said that Schischow had been shadowed and warned of a possible kidnapping and "liquidation".
Almost a year after her departure, Zichanouskaya is still grappling with the question of whether it was right to leave Belarus. "So many women are in prison now who have left their children with relatives," she said. "Sometimes these thoughts overwhelm you and you start looking for mistakes."
In going into exile, Zichanouskaya followed generations of Belarusian opposition leaders who were driven out by a stubborn regime. (The Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic, a fugitive provisional government ousted by the invading Red Army in 1918, is believed to be the world's oldest opposition government in exile and is now based in Ottawa, Canada.) But from its base in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius Zichanouskaja and her team succeeded in confronting Lukashenko with the most effective challenge so far.
"As part of their work, they really questioned whether 'in exile' means falling into oblivion and irrelevance, or whether there is something productive, something meaningful that can be done for those who are still there," said Julie Fisher, the US Ambassador to Belarus. (Fisher herself, as she puts it, is "geographically challenged" as Belarus has refused to process her visa since she was confirmed in office in December.)
Zichanouskaja says she is a "normal woman". She used to be an English teacher and was completely apolitical until last year. In the past 12 months, however, she has traveled across Europe with her team of advisors to meet with dozens of heads of state, including Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Emmanuel Macron, to keep up the pressure on the regime and advocate for the concerns of political prisoners to use.
“At international meetings you want to cry and shout: 'Look at this!'
Because that's our pain, ”she said.
The trial of Zichanouskaja's husband on what are widely considered to be politically motivated allegations began in June and, if convicted, faces up to 15 years in prison.
As Zichanouskaya said at a June hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, her 11-year-old son understands what a prison is, but her 5-year-old daughter thinks it is “kind of an interesting place, much like a business trip ".
"No matter how many articles you can read or talk to diplomats, that can't replace hearing directly from someone like you," Fisher said.
Both sides learn from each other.
“I have the best teachers ever,” said Zichanouskaya.
“Because my teachers are presidents and prime ministers.
Because at every meeting I learn how they behave, how they communicate.
You don't learn that in books. "
On a trip to Washington in July, Zichanouskaya met top officials in the United States, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Joe Biden, and received a reception that would make many world leaders green with envy.
The only question is: how did she do it?
II. The last dictator of Europe
In 2005, then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described Belarus as “the last real dictatorship left in the heart of Europe” while on a trip to Moscow. Young Belarusians were reluctant to use this description because they are tired of their country being looked at through its president. But it is an expression of the unchanged Soviet character of the Belarusian regime.
Former kolkhoz director Lukashenko won the last free elections in the country in 1994. At the center of his early popularity, which earned him the nickname “Batka” (father), was a social contract that was supposed to protect Belarus from the social and economic conflicts that were being engendered prevailed in much of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. This so-called welfare authoritarianism relied on full employment and extensive social security, which came at a high price in terms of civil liberties and human rights. As Lukashenko consolidated his power, he made several of his political rivals disappear, who were widely believed to have been murdered.Opposition leaders were quickly arrested or driven into exile, and regular protest movements were brutally suppressed.
Lukashenko became dependent on Russia to prop up its state-dominated economy with generous energy subsidies, and the relationship between the countries has been described as "oil for kisses". In return, Moscow was given the loyalty of an important buffer state between its western borders and Europe. But the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine in 2014 unsettled Lukashenko and prompted him to turn to the West to compensate for his revanchist eastern neighbor. That caused the ice to melt. The regime released the remaining political prisoners in 2015, prompting the European Union to lift most of its sanctions against dozens of members of the regime, including Lukashenko himself. “This was accompanied by liberalization within society, and ...[by summer 2020] people had simply forgotten that they were living in an authoritarian regime, ”said Yauheni Preiherman, director of the Minsk Dialogue Council on International Relations.
Public discontent with the country's weak economy had been going on for some time, but the country was nonetheless shocked by Lukashenko's indifferent response to what he termed "mass psychosis" and which refused to take action to contain the spread of the virus to take. At the same time, a number of new presidential candidates emerged, in which many Belarusians saw real alternatives to Lukashenko for the first time in years. These included members of the country's elite such as former banker Wiktar Babaryka and Valeryj Zepkala, the former Belarusian ambassador to the United States who later ran the country's hi-tech park. "The fact that people from the elite defected to challenge Lukashenko was a great sign that something was changing,"explained Artyom Shraibman, Non-Resident Scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. In contrast to the sober campaigns of previous opposition leaders, Babaryka brought in public relations strategists and media experts to develop a nifty campaign that “earned him sympathy in the creative class in Minsk,” said Katsiaryna Shmatsina of the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies.
At the same time, Zichanouskaja's husband Sjarhej Zichanouski, who launched his popular YouTube channel “A Land for Life” in 2019, had launched his own candidacy for the presidency and was traveling around the country to small towns that were once considered the heartland of Lukashenko's support. Zichanouski, a cheeky, sturdy man, drove in a trailer with the label “Real News of Belarus” and asked local residents about their problems. His style was more populist and rougher than the elaborate campaigns of Babaryka and Zepkala. “It was very well received by the frustrated rural people and it worked,” explained Shraibman, adding that the three campaigns worked “in perfect synergy” to mobilize broad sections of the population.
None of them made it to election day.
Zichanouski was arrested in May 2020.
Babaryka was arrested the following month and sentenced to 14 years in prison for alleged bribery and money laundering.
The allegations against both men are widely believed to be politically motivated.
Zepkala fled to Russia in July after receiving news that his arrest would be the next and threats made against his children.
III.
The interpreter
Svyatlana Zichanouskaya was born on September 11, 1982 as Svyatlana Pilipchuk in the small town of Mikashevichy, a Soviet mono-town dominated by the nearby granite mine, in the south of Belarus. The Pilipchuks lived in a five-story block of flats made of prefabricated concrete slabs, as they were then and still is common in the territory of the Soviet Union. According to the Belarusian press, her father worked as a driver in a nearby precast concrete factory and her mother as a cook in a city canteen. The family was close and loved to read. "We read a lot in our family," she told the Belarusian news site Free News Plus last year. "While all the other children were playing, my sister and I devoured books."
In 1986, when Zichanouskaya was three years old, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded, causing the worst nuclear disaster in history, blowing clouds of radioactive material over Europe. About 70 percent of the radioactive fallout ended up in Belarus, contaminating food and water supplies. The thyroid cancer rate in children, whose growing bodies are particularly vulnerable to radioactive radiation, increased tenfold in the affected areas. After the disaster, a number of international charities were set up to bring children out of the area for a summer - efforts that are still ongoing as even a short break has been shown to reduce the body's exposure to radiation.
A bright student who spoke good English, Zichanouskaja was chosen by her teacher, along with another student, to spend a summer in Roscrea, Central Ireland, in the mid-1990s. "They were two wild, adventurous young children," said Henry Deane, who hosted Zichanouskaja with his wife Marian. “You get addicted to children's laughter.” Most of the children were only there for one summer, but Zichanouskaja returned to Ireland four times as an interpreter for the younger children. In her early twenties, Zichanouskaja had the opportunity to stay and work in Ireland but returned to Belarus to be close to her family, she told Free News Plus.
David, the Deanes' son, who was in college when Zichanouskaya first went to college, described her as "largely the same" as the other girls her age, but said that she was distinguished by her compassion. If the younger children were homesick or had communication problems with their host families, it was Zichanouskaya they turned to. “That's why she was brought back as an interpreter. Not because her English was the best, but because she just seemed to have this compassion. "
The Deanes regularly received calls from host families whose host children had broken up. The children then came by and crawled on Zichanouskaja's lap. She stroked their hair and tickled their worries out of them in Russian. It is precisely this quality that sets Zichanouskaja apart from others today, says David Deane. "In a world in which more and more leaders are trying to legitimize themselves through repulsive toxic masculinity, their legitimacy rests exclusively - and that sounds really clichéd and trite - on their compassion, their vulnerability and their transparency."
In May, when her husband was serving his first 15-day prison sentence, Zichanouskaya brought his candidacy for president to the House of Government, a dismissive building in central Minsk that also houses the Central Electoral Commission. When her husband's candidacy was rejected, Zichanouskaya went home and began to compile the necessary documents for her own candidacy. "I wanted to show him - and only him - that I stand behind him," said Zichanouskaja. The next day, the last day of the application deadline, she went back to the electoral commission with her own candidacy. She didn't tell her husband about her plan. When the presidential candidates were called to the Commission again the following week, Zichanouskaya was certain that she would be toldthat her candidacy had been rejected. She prepared a speech in which she would tell Lidia Yermoschina, the chairman of the commission, about the imprisonment of her husband and the suffering of the people under the Lukashenko regime. She learned them by heart, but that wasn't necessary. Zichanouskaja's candidacy was accepted. “Are you sure you want to be president?” They asked. "I've dreamed about it all my life," she replied.they asked. "I've dreamed about it all my life," she replied.they asked. "I've dreamed about it all my life," she replied.
While her husband's plan was to stand as a protest candidate and call on his supporters to boycott the election, Zichanouskaya took a different route. On July 16, she was invited to a meeting with Maria Kalesnikava, Babaryka's chief of staff, and Veronica Zepkala, whose husband had already been excluded from running. Within 15 minutes, the women agreed to join forces and pool the resources of the Babaryka and Zepkala campaigns behind Zichanouskaja.
The trio quickly adopted a characteristic pose for the cameras: Zepkala held up a peace sign, Zichanouskaja a fist, and Kalesnikava formed a heart with her hands. "I was stronger because I had strong women by my side," said Zichanouskaya. They united their supporters around a simple three-point basis: the release of political prisoners, the amendment of the constitution and a fair presidential election open to all. "In our part of the world, where men usually fight for power, people intuitively began to trust women, especially when they said, 'We're not here for power or politics,'" he said former presidential candidate Waleryj Zepkala. (In September Kalesnikava tore up her passport on the Ukrainian border,when the Belarusian authorities tried to forcibly evict them from the country. She has been imprisoned since then. She has been charged with conspiracy to seize power and form an extremist group and could face up to 12 years in prison if convicted. At the opening of her trial in early August, Kalesnikava was shown dancing in the dock and making her iconic hand gesture, the heart.)
All three were new to politics, but Kalesnikava, a flautist known in the Minsk art scene, and Zepkala, business development manager at Microsoft, seemed comfortable in the spotlight. Zichanouskaya, on the other hand, does not. “We worked step by step,” said Zichanouskaja's press spokeswoman Anna Krasulina, referring to the fact that they taught her how to use the media and persuaded her to do radio and television interviews. But if anything, then their lack of experience and political ambition only made them more popular with voters.
"It is, so to speak, a metaphor for the entire Belarusian uprising," says Carnegie-Scholar Shraibman.
"Circumstances have pushed Belarus and Svyatlana out of their relatively comfortable bubble into the dangerous world of politics, and society has basically matured with them."
IV. "Our real President"
Although Zichanouskaja is considered the winner of the presidential elections, she has decided not to designate herself as President-elect due to the lack of a final vote count. She has repeatedly stated that she has no political ambitions of her own and that she sees herself as a transitional position until new presidential elections can be held. But the presumed election victory has made it easier for world leaders to stand up for them. It has also set them free from the sympathy trap that plagues politicians around the world. "She never chose a person she wanted to be, she was just herself," Shraibman explained. If you ask her in interviews how she dealt with the setbacks of the past year,She draws attention to the plight of the country's political prisoners, to the hundreds of people she is always aware of and who she represents.
Many believe that Zichanouskaya was able to apply because the regime underestimated her capabilities. "He thought that he could make fun of Svyatlana for being a housewife," said Zepkala. Lukashenko ridiculed the idea that a woman could become president. “The poor things,” he said, would “collapse” under the strain. "They didn't bother to check who Zichanouskaya is," Krasulina said, adding that she had shown her resolve through years of struggle for adequate treatment and speech therapy for her son. “In Belarus you have to move mountains to get such results. And she moved these mountains. "
During her recent trip to Washington, Zichanouskaya urged senior US officials to impose sanctions on key industries in Belarus in an attempt to change the behavior of the Belarusian government. She continues to advocate the release of political prisoners and a dialogue with the regime, which should lead to new and fair elections. She has no intention of running for president again. “I will be there for people as long as they need me,” she said. "But if the new president and prime minister are good managers, I will happily become a normal person again."
Despite the violent crackdown on demonstrators in the first days after the election, demonstrators continued to take to the streets in Minsk every Sunday in the weeks following the election. The number of participants was often over 100,000. But the regime remained tough and ruthlessly cracked down on non-governmental organizations, journalists and demonstrators. Thousands of people fled the country, many settling in the Polish and Lithuanian capital. The repression in Belarus has reached a Kafkaesque level of absurdity. A woman in Minsk was fined nearly $ 1,000 for wearing red and white socks - the colors of the flag associated with the country's pro-democracy movement. Dozens of people were arrested and sentenced in the city of Brest,because they danced in the street. After Russia's encouragement, Lukashenko has proposed a constitutional amendment to quell the unrest, but few expect a fundamental change.
Her followers obviously give Zichanouskaja a boost as they are inspired by her.
On a hazy Sunday afternoon in July, a large group of people from the Belarusian diaspora gathered to meet Zichanouskaya in Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington.
Andre Alkhouka from the Belarusian city of Vitebsk, where he was active in the local opposition, was waiting for Zichanouskaya in the midst of the crowd with a bouquet of red and white flowers.
"We are here today because our real president is coming here," he said.
"We have only been here [in America] for a month," added Alkhouka, gesturing at the thick black monitor the immigration service has attached to his ankle.
After Alkhouka and his wife were arrested and their adult son was beaten by the police, the family decided to leave Belarus for their safety. Since air traffic over Belarus was suspended after the authorities diverted a Ryanair flight to Minsk to arrest a dissident journalist and his girlfriend, the family took a bus to Ukraine, from where they took several flights to Tijuana, Mexico, and then crossed the border into the United States. A decision has not yet been made on their asylum application.
Prior to her trip to Washington, Zichanouskaja visited Ireland, where she met the Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney.
She also attended the Deanes in Roscrea.
On the stairs in front of the family home, Zichanouskaya gave an interview to the Irish media.
"She was that political figure," said Henry Deane.
But as soon as the front door closed behind her, she ran up the stairs to see her old bedroom, he said.
The weather was fine and not too hot, and despite a busy schedule, Zichanouskaya stayed with the Deanes most of the day - in the house where she spent so many summers as a child.
Zichanouskaja and Deane could walk undisturbed in his garden.
"I wanted to look her in the eye," Deane explained, "and see how she reacts when I ask her, 'How are you?'"
by Amy Mackinnon
Amy Mackinnon is
a reporter for
Foreign Policy,
responsible for national security and intelligence. Twitter: @ak_mack
This article was first published in English on August 6, 2021 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” - as part of a cooperation, a translation is now also available to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals. * Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
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