First president of independent Belarus, Stanislav Chouchkevitch died at the age of 87, his wife announced on Wednesday May 4 to AFP.

"We hope he will have a state funeral, but no one has contacted us so far]," said his widow, Irina Shuchkevitch, whose husband was in opposition to authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.

The Belarusian power had not reacted Wednesday afternoon to this death.

The leader of the opposition, Svetlana Tikhanovskaïa, paid tribute to the man who was one of the gravediggers of the Soviet Union.

Forced into exile after the 2020 presidential election, the opponent spoke of "a great loss for the Belarusian people and the democratic world". 

According to several media, the former president died after being very weakened by the Covid-19 which he contracted in March.

His wife had indicated at the end of April that her husband was in intensive care.

On December 8, 1991, in Belovejskaya Pouchtcha (western Belarus), the presidents of Soviet Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, Boris Yeltsin, Stanislav Chouchkevich and Leonid Kravchuk, had initialed a treaty organizing the dissolution of the USSR, shortly after forcing its last leader Mikhail Gorbachev to resign, thus signing the death warrant of the Soviet empire which he was then trying to reform.

Opposition to Alexander Lukashenko

The current Belarusian President, Alexander Lukashenko, was the only member of the Belarusian Parliament who, in December 1991, refused to vote in favor of the ratification of the Belovezhskaya Pushcha agreement.

As early as 1994, Stanislas Chouchkevitch was removed from office by the deputies, accused, along with other senior officials, of corruption in a report by Alexander Lukashenko, then head of a parliamentary anti-corruption commission.

A few months later, the latter won the presidential election against Stanislav Chouchkevitch and other candidates.

Almost thirty years later, Lukashenko is still at the head of the country.

Stanislav Chouchkevitch for his part led, until 2018, a small opposition social-democratic party.

During a protest movement in 2011, he had been arrested several times, and had indicated in 2012 that the regime had forbidden him to leave the country.

However, he never played a central role in national political life.

With AFP

The summary of the

France 24 week invites you to come back to the news that marked the week

I subscribe

Take international news everywhere with you!

Download the France 24 app

google-play-badge_FR