Resisting 'Europe's last dictator' in Belarus

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2020

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

For more than 20 years, people in Belarus have been protesting against the authoritarian rule of President Alexander Lukashenko - who's been dubbed Europe's last dictator. Lukashenko came to power in a landslide election victory in 1994 but he soon changed the constitution to give himself sweeping new powers. He has remained in office ever since, winning elections which observers say are rigged. Opponents of the regime have faced harassment, violence and arrest. Some are believed to have been kidnapped and murdered by the state. Alex Last has been speaking to the exiled dissident and co-founder of the Belarus Free Theatre, Nikolai Khalezin, about the origins of the protest movement in Belarus.

Photo: A banner compares Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to Stalin and Hitler, during a protest march in Minsk, Belarus, March 15, 2000 (Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me
0:44.8	Alex Last. And all this week we'll be looking back at how resistance movements have
0:49.2	shaped our world and we start with Belarus where there's been mass protests against the 26 year rule of the authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko dubbed Europe's last dictator.
1:01.0	The origins of the protest movement go back to the 1990s and this is the story
1:05.9	of why one dissident hard to explain. It was very hard to explain.
1:15.0	It was very hard to explain.
1:20.0	It was the momentum. We were just doing it. In the beginning it's always a small group,
1:30.0	the people who've stepped over the boundary of fear a long time ago, and it's the people who've stepped over the boundary of fear a long time ago,
1:33.0	and it's the people who understand a simple truth.
1:36.0	It's not scary to fight.
1:39.0	It's scary to look at people who are fighting. Nikolai Kalazin is a famous Belarus and artist, playwright and the exiled co-founder of the Underground
1:51.8	Belarus Free Theatre. but back in 1994 he was working in a
1:56.3	modern art gallery he had set up in the capital Minsk when Alexander Lukashenko,
2:01.6	a former boss of a collective farm, was first elected president of Belarus,
2:07.2	just years after the small nation had emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lukashenko was a populist who promised to fight corruption
2:16.3	and he forged close ties with Russia.
	...

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