Scores detained as Belarus protest broken up

BELARUS authorities raided the offices of a prominent rights group on Saturday, detaining dozens of people, including foreign rights workers, ahead of a planned protest by opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko.

The police also detained dozens in the streets and seized a leading opposition leader, Vladimir Nekliayev, as he was returning from Poland, taking him off the train at the border and placing him in detention.

Scores of people that turned up for the 2pm rally were grabbed by riot police and placed in vans, including several journalists. Some were beaten, an AFP correspondent observed.

Viasna, a nongovernmental organisation that had been tracking arrests and protest rallies across Belarus in recent weeks, said riot police had broke down the door, “put people face down on the floor and told them to stay there”.

“There were 57 people detained, including foreign observers,” it said on its website.

Viasna’s director, Ales Beliatski, later said that about 1,000 people had been detained Saturday.

The people seized at Viasna’s offices were taken to a police station, where they were told they are “suspected of banditism”, searched and let out of the station in small groups after most of the protest had been broken up, the group’s lawyer Anastasiya Loiko said.

“They put us on the ground, and they took some telephones,” Masha Chichtchenkova, a Franco-Belarusian member of Front Line Defenders, said after her release. “They put us in a minibus and took us to a gymnasium.”

Saturday’s protest was the latest in a series of events against Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime, and the largest since the mass demonstrations that followed his disputed re-election in December 2010.

Thousands have attended rallies in recent weeks to oppose a controversial new tax on “spongers” or “freeloaders” – those who work less than six months a year – as the country suffers an economic slump, with the swell in protests alarming the government.

Dozens had already been arrested in the days ahead of Saturday’s event, as state television aired reports of alleged weapons caches discovered while police armed with automatic rifles were in the city centre for the first time in decades. But there was no mention of the harsh crackdown by state media outlets on Saturday evening.