
Advertisement
Somewhere in the silence, a group of frustrated Belarusian youths are fighting back. Taking inspiration from Greece’s "cells of fire", they launched high-stakes attacks against reviled state symbols, focused primarily on Lukashenko, who we’ve run a couple of stories on before. In power since 1994; Lukashenko was banned from attending the 2012 Olympics for his atrocious human rights record. Nice guy. More recently, he labelled opposition in the Belarusian election “cowards” for boycotting what is widely believed to be a fixed vote. Belarus needs a break, and in a country where street demonstrations are brutally suppressed, perhaps the surprise attacks of an anarchist group will help to provide an ignored and oppressed people with the platform they need.
I spoke to an anarchist inside the regime, who explained that the motivation for the attacks was born from a frustration at there being “no legal way of getting people's attention or making a public event for more than 10 minutes. This, alongside the popularity of the Greek protests, led to new methods of struggle”. They have little choice – after all, most legitimate forms of opposition are banned.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Arson attacks started in 2009, when underground anarchists launched a clandestine campaign, attacking the army’s General Staff headquarters with a smoke grenade. They went on to fire flares at Russian-owned casinos, set fire to a police station and firebomb the Russian Embassy and a state-owned bank. After films of the attacks were posted online in a bid to inspire others and the KGB inevitably set about arresting people, further solidarity firebomb attacks on detention centres and the KGB headquarters were carried out.Today, five anarchists accused of the attacks are currently in penal colonies, serving sentences ranging from three to eight years. These prisoners, among thousands of others, face nightmare conditions in post-Soviet prisons that enforce brutal structures of hierarchy within the inmates. The bizarre caste system ranges from the Blatnye (professional criminals), down to the Opuschennye (outcasts), who are regular targets for sexual violence.
In 2010, Lukashenko's landslide election win provoked mass protests, and the regime remains on edge about the prospect of repeated unrest in the fallout from the coming result. One autocrat recently assured citizens that "We don't need revolutions and shake-ups”. Actually, that’s probably the only thing they really do need, but the government are going in as hard as possible to prevent any disquiet. Last week, plainclothes security officers beat an Associated Press photographer and detained seven other journalists, simply for covering a protest attended by just four opposition activists.
Advertisement