Addressing one of her last election rallies in the summer, independent presidential candidate Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya prepared her followers for a patient wait till their apparent will to unseat their country’s long-serving and proudly authoritarian president Lukashenka will be honored. It will take more than just casting votes to get their will expressed in the outcome that matters, she suggested. But she will be there to fight for a fair acknowledgement of the true election results for many months if need be.
Nearly six months after the rigged August 9 elections, Tsikhanouskaya is in half-voluntary exile, and many of her supporters are in prison after a reported 30,000 were detained and often brutally treated by the security forces. Crucially, the latter remained, at least as an organization, loyal to the incumbent after he was (self-) declared the winner of the election while the massive, spirited and impressively enduring post-electoral protests of Tsikhanouskaya’s supporters slowly but inevitably diminished in size and determination. However, not only the pro-democracy movement and all foreign governments aspiring for influence in Belarus seem deprived of the outcome that they hoped for, but Lukashenka’s regime also remains severely deprived of domestic political authority and international respect.
Our roundtable explored what kind of political stabilization or destabilization may be awaiting Belarus, what the realistic options and constraints are for the regime, the opposition, Russia, and the international community concerned over the state of human rights in Belarus.
Speakers:
Kateryna Bornukova, Academic Director, BEROC Economic Research Center
Anaïs Marin, Associate Fellow, Chatham House
Artyom Shraibman, political analyst, founder, Sense Analytics
Kenneth S. Yalowitz, Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center, former US Ambassador to Belarus
Discussant:
Miklós Hargitai, Fellow, Center for Media, Data and Society, CEU Democracy Institute, former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Belarus
Moderator:
Gábor Tóka, Senior Research Fellow, Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, CEU
Learn more about them:
[ Ссылка ]
Subscribe for more videos:
[ Ссылка ]
