They are Europe’s “disappeared.”
Dozens of people arrested while protesting the
Belarus presidential election have vanished and remain
unaccounted for — and the EU should not forget them, opposition
leader
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya said Monday.
In an interview with POLITICO, Tikhanovskaya, who fled to
neighboring Lithuania in fear for her own safety, described her
missing supporters as political prisoners made to disappear by the
regime of strongman
Alexander Lukashenko, who is still clinging to power despite
continuing widespread protests and labor strikes over the disputed
August 9 election.
“What I want to tell is that a lot of people in Belarus now are
political prisoners,” Tikhanovskaya said, speaking by
videoconference. “They just are in jail without any court, and they
are in there only for their, I don’t know, for their wish to talk
about what’s going on in Belarus, about their desire to live in a
free country.
“After the demonstrations,” she said in halting but clear
English, “we still don’t know where about 70 people are and they
are miss[ing] and it’s a very big problem for us because it
shouldn’t be in a European country in the 21st century that people
are miss[ing] and authorities don’t do anything just to find
them.
“Everybody has seen all the
violence that our authorities have committed, our police
committed toward all these peaceful people,” Tikhanovskaya said.
“And not one criminal case was organized to investigate this, you
know these crimes, as if it’s normal. No, it’s not normal and cases
should be opened against every policeman that beat these
people.”
Tikhanovskaya spoke to POLITICO a day after tens of thousands of
people again took to the streets in Minsk, and Lukashenko deployed
large contingents of riot police, and cordoned off key buildings,
including the residence of the embattled leader who was celebrating
his 66th birthday.
She expressed confidence that the protests, along with labor
strikes, would continue until Lukashenko relinquished power, and
she suggested that his opponents were prepared for a long struggle
that could take on new forms.
“Strikes are extremely important and also strikes can have
different forms,” she said. “There are many ways, and it is not
only through demonstrations.
“I know that this will not stop,” she added. “You should
understand … we woke up … we will not accept him anymore.”
In the interview, Tikhanovskaya restated her commitment to
leading the country only to new, free elections, and said she had
no plan to serve long-term as president. She said that the release
of political prisoners, including her husband Sergei Tikhanovsky,
as well as the replacement of the country’s entire central election
commission remained top preconditions for a new vote.
She acknowledged that she is now a “national leader” and “I can
consider myself to be a national elected president,” but she said,
“I don’t feel myself comfortable in this position.
“I understand that people voted for me,” she said. “But they
voted for me not as president, they voted for me as a person who
will lead the country to new elections.
“I am not going to be involved in new elections and I don’t have
a right to participate in them because I promised my people that I
will not take part,” she said. “My mission will be over … when we
will organize these elections.”
She added that it would be up to her husband to decide if he
still wanted to run for president after being released from prison
and she said she was not sure that he had full information about
the recent developments in the country given his incarceration.
Throughout the interview, Tikhanovskaya sought to portray the
protests as a domestic political issue without a larger
geopolitical narrative pitting Russia and former Soviet territories
against the West, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and
others have tried to assert.
She also expressed relatively little concern about Russian
intervention and seemed to go out of her way to avoid provoking the
Kremlin, even refraining from criticizing the Russian government
over the poisoning of opposition leader
Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption protester who has become a
nemesis of President Vladimir Putin.
“Of course we are against any such cases, any violence, any
poisoning of people, it shouldn’t be solved like this, it’s
absolutely inhuman,” she said of Navalny, who is currently
receiving medical treatment in Germany. “But I can’t, you know,
talk about this, because there should be real investigation in this
case. And I can’t blame anybody without investigation.”
Tikhanovskaya said it was up to foreign political leaders
levying sanctions against Belarus, including
EU leaders, to decide if Lukashenko should personally face
sanctions. And she paused for a long while when asked if Lukashenko
should be brought to justice before an international tribunal in
The Hague.
“You know, I think I am not ready to answer this question openly
because I think that at the moment at least, at the moment, it’s
the responsibility of the Belarusian people to stand for their
freedom, for their rights. And you know I have to think over your
question, because I never thought about this problem from this
point of view. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm, I will think it over.”
She said the decision by Lukashenko’s regime to
strip the credentials of many foreign journalists was
indicative of the government’s effort to hide evidence of police
violence and other abuses. And she said
opposition forces would remain peaceful and were willing to
negotiate with anyone in a position to bring about a new round of
free, fair elections.
She also defended her decision to leave for Lithuania, saying it
was necessary not only for her personal safety but has allowed her
to communicate with international leaders and publicize the plight
of her supporters. Still, despite expressing gratitude for the
support of outside powers, she urged that Belarus be allowed to
stand on its own.
“We are peaceful people and we don’t want anything except to
solve this problem,” she said. “We want these people to go away and
to build our country with a new president. It’s not about
geopolitics. It’s our internal affair and we ask for respect of our
sovereignty. We ask every country — but in case we need any kind
of help in these negotiations, in case we need mediators, we ask to
just be ready to help us.”
