In Belarus, women lead protests, smash stereotypes
MINSK, BELARUS— With masked riot police officers massing nearby, threatening to attack protesters like him with batons and fists, Aleksei Zulevsky felt safe for the first time in weeks of anti-government unrest in Belarus: He was surrounded by hundreds of women he knew would shield him.
“I feel protected here,” said Zulevsky, as fellow protesters, many holding red and white flags, the banner of the opposition, chanted at a rally last month. “Only cowards beat women!”
In a country whose strongman president, Alexander Lukashenko, has openly scoffed at women as too weak for politics and told them their place was in the kitchen, Belarusian women became the face and driving force of a movement aimed at toppling a leader known as “Europe’s last dictator.”
That effort may be flagging, with Lukashenko refusing to give up power even though tens of thousands continue to come out to the streets of Minsk to protest every Sunday. But whether or not it succeeds in ousting him, the protest movement has already shattered deeply entrenched gender stereotypes built up over generations.
“Women were stronger in this situation,” said Tatiana Kotes, a film production designer and activist. “We had to assume a more significant role. Men’s dominating role in the society has collapsed.”
The collapse began even before an Aug. 9 presidential election that Lukashenko claimed to have won by a landslide, setting off two months of almost non-stop protests. To his obvious distaste, Lukashenko faced an unexpectedly strong challenge from a woman candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the wife of a popular blogger who had hoped to run himself but was imprisoned before he could register as a candidate.
Lukashenko mocked his rival as a housewife, a meek mother ill-equipped to debate serious issues of state with a veteran leader like himself.
“She just cooked a tasty cutlet, maybe fed the children, and the cutlet smelled nice,” Lukashenko said in an interview shortly before the election. “And now there’s supposed to be a debate about some issues.”
Adding to his rage and, perhaps, consternation, was the fact that the opposition, previously led by men and prone to bitter internal feuding, had united around three women — Tsikhanouskaya, whom they backed as the candidate; Veronika Tsepkalo, the wife of a would-be candidate who fled the country to avoid arrest; and Maria Kolesnikova, the campaign manager for Viktor Babariko, a jailed banker who had also hoped to challenge Lukashenko.
With all the main male opposition figures knocked out of the race by arrest or flight abroad, Tsikhanouskaya and her two colleagues ran a strategic and successful campaign, holding large rallies across the country while Lukashenko confined himself to Soviet-style visits to factories and military bases.
“At our first rallies, we were amazed to see how many people turned up,” Tsepkalo, 44, said in an interview. “It was a symbol of the unity of Belarusians against the dictatorship.”
Kolesnikova, the only one of the women to remain in Belarus after the election, achieved hero status when she tore up her passport to foil the government’s plan to deport her to Ukraine, and was then imprisoned.
But it is perhaps Lukashenko himself who, inadvertently, has done more than anyone to advance the cause of feminism. Casting himself as a classic Slavic “muzhik,” or real man, Lukashenko has sneered at women with such abandon that he has become a caricature of boorish misogyny and an easy target for attack.
Sergei Chaly, a Belarusian political and economic analyst who worked with Lukashenko at the beginning of his political career in the 1990s, said Tsikhanouskaya made a smart decision to portray herself as “a simple woman that just needs her husband and children, but who was selected by fate to fulfil a political role.”
That appealed to voters wary of the dominating and masculine style presented by Lukashenko throughout his 26 years in power.