The protests against Alexander Lukashenko, who is accused of cheating on the presidency in the August 9 election, continue.
- Our president is Sveta, chanted a group of women before they were abruptly taken away by riot police.
Sveta refers to the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who is currently in exile for fear of being subjected to reprisals by the power apparatus around Lukashenko.
Nina Bahinskaja, who often took the lead in the protests in Belarus, was also arrested last weekend but was released later, according to the human rights organization Vjasna.
Wearing the opposition flag
During the protests, several of the protesters, including Bahinskaya, carried the opposition's white-red-white flag, which became the country's flag after the liberation from the Soviet Union in 1991. Four years later, when Lukashenko took power, the white-red-white flag was scrapped.
Belarus's 66-year-old President Alexander Lukashenko is often called Europe's last dictator.
On Wednesday, he surprised the outside world and the citizens of Belarus when he was suddenly sworn in for a new term as the country's president.
Following the presidential election in August, protests erupted on a scale not seen since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Thousands of people have since been arrested and the testimonies of police beatings and torture are numerous.