Dictator - Tumblr Posts
Keep talking about Belarus!
Belarus has been a dictatorship for many, many years, but it was never this gruesome, this... real. In case you didn't know, Lukashenko has been in office since 1994, he changed the constitution to be able to do it. The elections have been widely known to be falsified for years, getting lukashenko 80% or 90% of votes each and every time, although his real support is estimated to be realistically around 3%, and it could be even lower now, since he still denies the very existence (existence, not seriousness!) of coronavirus.
On the 10th of august, another election took place. To no surprise, 3 of his main opponents have suddenly been arrested and disqualified from the election in the last weeks and, as you could expect, he won again with 80% of votes.
So people have gone to the streets. Lukashenko is apparently hiding in Turkey. It's hard to organize, to communicate or to even document what's happening due to all of the internet being completely down.
Rhe police is shooting people, using tear gas and actual grenades on the masses. A cop van drove into the crowd from the behind running multiple people over. There's a lot of blood, ambulances, and possible dead, (UPDATE: one confirmed dead) though it's really impossible to know, as there are little to no news sources available in Belarus, especially with the wifi being down.
The belarussian police, or militia, is an organization working not only obviously unethically, but illegally too - people are mass-arrested without an open cause, beaten, held in arrest for days, and killed. Just yesterday a man's entire arm was ripped off in some kind of explosion. (This is not confirmed, second-hand relation). Nothing quite of this scale happened since the 90s, or possibly ever in the modern history of Belarus. Belarussians are finally demanding change, and really, what can the police do against a whole nation?
I wish I could reffer everyone to some kind of petition, charity organization, anything, but the events are so current that it's hard for me to say how people from other countries could possibly help. All I can do is raise a little awareness of what's happening, so please, keep reading, keep yourselves updated and informed and don't forget belarus.
