Belarus across the barricades - part two

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For 100 days and counting protesters are calling for an end to the 26-year long rule of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. Poet Valzhyna Mort records first-hand stories from her friends who are out protesting week after week; ordinary people making extraordinary choices. Obsessively, she reads the social media posts flooding her phone. In her hands, these tiny messages are poetry themselves, the oral history of our time captured on thousands of phones

Transcript

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0:00.0	How do I get ready to go?
0:05.0	Actually, I have a bag with me in case I am detained.
0:09.0	Some warm clothes, underwear socks, water, a snack.
0:14.0	Two pairs of socks.
0:16.0	Pants, maybe two pairs.
0:19.0	Toothbrush, toothpaste.
0:21.0	We had a badge with our address and a phone number attached to the close of our son who is four years old,
0:32.0	so that if he gets lost that it would be easier for people to
0:38.7	guide him home. Minsk capital of Belarus.
0:45.0	It's more than a hundred days that protesters have turned out in force against Alexander Lukashenko, the man they no longer recognize as
0:56.2	president.
0:59.8	You are listening to Belarus across the barricades on the BBC World Service and I am Valjina Mort.
1:07.0	I'm a poet living in the USA but I was born in Minsk.
1:13.0	Every one of those days and nights,
1:16.0	I've been in touch with my friends and even strangers back home.
1:20.0	They have been protesting every week despite shattering violence by the security forces.
1:29.0	I cannot tell you their names just in case.
1:34.0	Many of us were children when Lukashenko came to power in 1994.
1:39.0	His rule has forged the way we live and think and feel so the protests aren't only about
1:46.8	getting rid of one man they about something much deeper. For all my life I was completely non-political.
2:03.2	But what has changed me these days after the elections.
2:09.1	I'm living in the city center, so I was sitting on my balcony and I watched it all with my own eyes.
	...

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