Belarus police arrested dozens of mourners who tried to stage a banned vigil yesterday on the anniversary of a brutal crackdown on protests against President Alexander Lukashenko’s disputed re-election.
An AFP correspondent on Independence Square in central Minsk saw plainclothes security agents grab about 30 men and women who were holding portraits of political prisoners detained on election night one year ago.
Some screamed and kicked as police dragged them along the ground to security vans waiting on the edge of the square.
Witnesses reported similar scenes at other central locations as trucks packed with interior ministry troops sat parked along the city’s main thoroughfares while plainclothes police patrolled the streets.
“You will burn in hell for this,” one elderly women shouted at the police as they broke up a vigil at the Krasny (Red) Roman Catholic Church just off Independence Square. “What kind of children did we raise?”
The Vyasna rights organisation said on its website that agents from the KGB security services had also detained four prominent opposition leaders as they headed for the unsanctioned event.
The website of the Belarus Christian Democrat party separately said that police detained their leader Vital Rymasheuski as he was leaving his apartment.
Nearly 50,000 people rallied in the bitter winter cold a year ago when Mr Lukashenko was declared winner of a fraud-tainted ballot in which each of his nine rivals was awarded less than three per cent of the vote.
The show of fury at his 17-year regime led to more than 700 arrests and the imprisonment of six candidates in a crackdown that shattered all Western efforts to repair relations with the isolated ex-Soviet state.
Former deputy foreign minister Andrei Sannikov and old Lukashenko foe Mikola Statkevich were jailed for five and six years respectively while two other presidential hopefuls received suspended sentences, barring them from politics.
“This past year taught the people not to expect any positive changes from the government,” Mr Sannikov’s wife and prominent journalist Irina Khalip said in an interview on the eve of the anniversary.
“Our illusions of well-being were shattered. Our government is dead to us.”
The mass arrests came less than a day after Washington and the European Union called on Lukashenko to release and exonerate the rights leaders languishing in jail.