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.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS