'It's outrageous': Belarus election result sparks night of defiance and violence
Riot police in balaclavas dragged an unconscious man across a square in Minsk, his arms and head dangling lifelessly toward the pavement.
In another video filmed in the Belarusian capital, officers beat a young man and woman with clubs as they taunted them with the opposition’s calls for change. “You have to stay at home! Fuck change! Did you want change?”
It was a night of defiance and violence in cities across Belarus, where tens of thousands of opponents of the country’s president of 26 years, Alexander Lukashenko, faced off with heavily armed riot police.
Field medics treated people with blood streaming down their faces. An armoured car drove through protesters in Minsk, where activists said one person was killed and dozens were injured. Police said they had made more than 3,000 arrests.
A reporter for the Guardian saw officers use water cannon and rubber bullets against protesters. Near a column of riot police holding metal shields, one activist held up her hands in the symbol of a heart.
Speaking to protesters, there was a sense that young Belarusians had lost their fear of the government as the mood turned darker over an election they believe was stolen from the challenger Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
“We’re tired of this rudeness, this nastiness,” said a protester in Minsk who was wearing a dark T-shirt and a mask and declined to give his name. “We’re tired of these numbers, which are a spit in the face.”
Of Lukashenko, he said: “It’s not that I’m tired of the regime. If he had spent 26 years in power but behaved normally, then I would have had no problems with him.”
When polling stations closed at 8pm, the government released exit polls showing that Lukashenko had won 79.7% of the vote and Tikhanovskaya 6.8%. The official results were Lukashenko 80.2% and Tikhanovskaya 9.9%. The protesters viewed both sets of figures with extreme scepticism.
“Everyone has come out because we have been cheated,” said another man, a plumber. “When they gave her [Tikhanovskaya] just 6%, and she had actually won 70%, it was outrageous.”
Flashes of stun grenades echoed off the tower blocks near the Stela second world war memorial in Minsk, where thousands gathered holding up phone torches like a rock concert.
The mood differed from the euphoria of the pro-Tikhanovskaya rallies that had been some of the country’s largest since the Soviet Union, where 63,000 gathered in a Minsk square and sang Soviet-era protest anthems.
The protest crowd of hipsters and students were joined by young football fans egging each other on: “There’s a lot of us and not enough police clubs! Whoever gets hit first can make a wish.” One young woman in a white dress turned to a friend and said: “I don’t want to spent another minute here.”
Tikhanovskaya, who was briefly forced into hiding on Saturday evening, remained at her press centre where an air of nervousness reigned. An aide said she had been particularly disturbed by reports of dozens of injured and one man killed. The interior ministry denied on Monday that anyone had died.
In several cities, police were said to have refused to attack protestrs, who shouted: “The militia are with the people.”
As the protesters headed home in Minsk on Sunday night, police began picking them off one by one, often in the city’s darker corners. In one courtyard, two motorcycles sporting the opposition’s white ribbons lay abandoned on their sides.
“They were driving around the city, supporting the protesters,” a friend of the bikers told the Guardian. “Then they came here … suddenly a bus showed up, police jumped out and they took them away.”
At times even the riot police looked scared and confused about what to do. As the crowd called on a masked police officer to release an unconscious protester, he turned on them with a look of fear and exasperation visible through his balaclava.
“I did let him go!” he yelled. “Call an ambulance, you idiots.”