Belarus protests: ‘No election until you kill me’ says Lukashenko

Protests against Belarus president continued into 9th straight day

Belarus-minsk-protests-Alexander-Lukashenko-Reuters-1 Collage: People attend an opposition demonstration to protest against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus August 17, 2020 | Reuters/Vasily Fedosenko

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, considered the last reigning dictator in Europe, on Monday told workers that there would be no new presidential elections unless he was killed.

“We held elections already. Until you kill me, there will be no other elections,” he told workers at a tractor plant, as reported by Belarusian news outlet Tut.by.

Lukashenko’s visit to the factory plant was met by with heckling, and tens of thousands in Minsk took to the streets raising slogans against him as protests against the extension of his presidency continued into the ninth day.

Lukashenko has been the authoritarian president of Belarus since 1996.

Nearly 5,000 workers from the Minsk Tractor Works plant, which has been on strike since Monday morning, marched down the streets of Minsk, demanding that Lukashenko step down and cede his post to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the leading opposition candidate.

The official results of the August 9 vote gave Lukashenko 80 per cent of the votes and Tsikhanouskaya only 10 per cent, but the opposition claimed the vote was rigged.

Lukashenko on Monday said that he would be amenable to sharing power but that he would not do so under duress from protesters. According to Belta news agency, he said work was already underway to change the constitution and redistribute power.

The protests have posed the biggest challenge yet to Lukashenko's iron-fisted rule of the ex-Soviet nation of 9.5 million.

Belarusian authorities initially tried to suppress the rallies, detaining almost 7,000 people in the first days of the protests. Police moved aggressively, using stun grenades and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds, injuring scores of people.

However, as protests grew and the harsh crackdown drew criticism in the West, law enforcement refrained from interfering with the crowds and appeared all but absent during a rally on Sunday that attracted some 200,000 people.

Tsikhanouskaya said in a video statement Monday she was ready to facilitate a rerun of the disputed election.

“I'm ready to take on the responsibility and act as a national leader in order for the country to calm down, return to its normal rhythm, in order for us to free all the political prisoners and prepare legislation and conditions for organizing new presidential elections,” she said.

Lukashenko bristled at the idea of talks with the opposition, insisting his government was the only legitimate one, and rejected the idea of repeating the election at a rally in his support on Sunday. The embattled president told a crowd of 50,000 that the country would perish as a state otherwise, and denounced the protesters as stooges of foreign masterminds.

Lukashenko visited another tractor plant on Monday and dismissed the strikes as insignificant. “So, 150 (people) at some factory, even 200 don't make a difference," the president was quoted as saying by the state Belta news agency.

Thousands of workers from several other plants in the meantime gathered outside, shouting We're not sheep, we're people," and Strike! Maria Kolesnikova, Tsikhanouskaya's top associate, attended the gathering and said that only the former president (Lukashenko) stepping down will calm the nation down."

The European Council, meanwhile, has said that it would meet on Wednesday to discuss developments in Belarus, said chairman and European Council president Charles Michel.

The EU has already launched the process to impose sanctions on Belarusian officials accused of election frauds, EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said on Saturday.

Lukashenko had said then that Russia was ready to offer military support to quell the protests, after holding a phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Formally, Russia has expressed its “readiness” to provide the “necessary assistance in resolving the problems that have arisen on the basis of the principles of the Treaty on the Creation of the Union State, as well as, if necessary, through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).”

With inputs from agencies

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