In Belarus, the destruction of the critical public continues. According to news portals, a dozen associations that advocate human rights and free discussion are now the target of repression. The human rights organization Wjasna recorded 555 political prisoners on Wednesday, and on the same day eight Wjasna activists were arrested across the country. Affected associations are also Human Constanta, which campaigns for the rights of migrants on the Belarusian-Polish border, and the independent Belarusian Association of Journalists.
The new wave of persecution is all the more serious because important sources of independent media have previously been banned, including "Nascha Niwa", the country's oldest newspaper, which announced that it had to cease working in Belarus for security reasons.
The editor-in-chief Jahor Marzinowitsch had previously been arrested in Minsk along with three employees.
The human rights activist from Vyazna and the journalists Andrej Skurko, Andrej Dynko and Volha Rakowitsch are to be tried for allegedly disturbing the public peace.
Last summer, Nascha Niwa and Vjasna, like many other independent media outlets, reported on abuse in Belarusian prisons and on further protests and tirelessly shed light on developments across the country.
The state feels threatened
The deputy chairman of the KGB investigation department, Konstantin Bytschek, officially described the persecutions on the state television channel “Belarus 1” as purges. About the search for participants in discussions critical of the government on Telegram channels, he said: "In the course of investigative activities and investigations, the identity of participants was established". A large-scale operation to clean up radical people is currently underway, said Bytschek, according to the state news agency Belta. In the worldview of the Minsk KGB, the hundreds of thousands of protesters are radicals because they demand free elections and an end to state violence. Bytschek also indirectly admits that the state apparatus feels threatened by the wave of protests to this day.
The purges are mainly carried out through the judiciary and the penal system. Twelve employees of the online portal Tut.by have been in custody since May 18. After the blocking of online offers from numerous other independent media, which are strongly represented in the regions beyond Minsk, information is only accessible via Telegram channels and social networks. Belarus today is a society in which, on the one hand, the algorithms of international corporations decide how news is spread. On the other hand, every Internet user has to put together a picture of reality from countless Telegram channels. The operators of the largest independent media company "tut.by" are not intimidated and have registered a new Internet portal with "Zerkalo.io". You count onthat enough people in Belarus can set up a secure VPN tunnel to technically bypass government blockades.