Taking on the ruler of Belarus

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya had nothing to do with politics until recently, and has now become the main opposition candidate for the presidential election in Belarus on the 9th of August. She became a candidate when her husband, a leading opposition leader, was suddenly jailed. Jean Mackenzie was able to meet her, and the other women taking on President Lukashenko who has ruled for 26 years. In Australia, relations with its main trading partner China are the worst they've been for decades, over issues ranging from the coronavirus to tariffs on beef and barley. And Australians of Chinese descent are increasingly becoming the victims of racist abuse. Frances Mao, Chinese-Australian herself, reports from Sydney. Florida has reported a record high daily death toll from Covid-19, and governor Ron DeSantis has been under pressure to toughen up restrictions. There is no state-wide requirement to wear masks, but individual cities like Miami have imposed them. Attitudes to the virus remain quite divided, as Tamara Gil has been discovering in Miami. Laos was neutral in the Vietnam war, but was heavily bombed by the Americans anyway, as their North Vietnamese enemies ran supply routes to American-backed South Vietnam via the country. Unexploded ordinance from that time are blighting lives in Laos decades later, as Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent found out. If a common language divides Britain and America, as they say, then how much more does a separate language divide Britain and France? The single word postilion or postillon in French sheds quite a lot of light on what makes these countries so different, says Hugh Schofield in Paris, who is fluent in both languages. Presenter: Kate Adie Producer: Arlene Gregorius

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:04.6	Good morning.
0:06.6	Today, tension down under with relation strained between Australia and China,
0:11.7	not just internationally but on a personal level.
0:15.7	Pictures a short while ago of the beaches in Florida looking like any ordinary summer with
0:19.9	sunbathing, crowded boardwalks and thrond cafes have led to the state becoming the epicenter of the pandemic, so we take the temperature in the sunshine state.
0:31.0	No war ever ends neatly and cleanly and we hear how Laos is still having to cope with the detritus of conflict decades on.
0:40.0	And how's your French? Our correspondent explains how a single word,
0:45.3	Pustillon, tells us a whole lot about why the French and British are so different.
0:50.6	First, to Belarus, a country that rarely figures in European holiday plans having
0:56.8	a heavy-handed authoritarian regime where President Lukashenko has been in charge for 26 years. Nevertheless, there's a presidential
1:06.6	election in a week's time in which Svetlana Tzikhanovska's husband had been a leading candidate until he was suddenly imprisoned.
1:16.5	The other major opposition leaders have also been arrested or they've fled the country and
1:21.1	activists have been detained. Somewhat reluctantly Svetlana took up the
1:26.8	baton and Jean Mackenzie has been to see her.
1:30.9	I've arrived at our secret meeting point, crouched on the edge of an empty children's
1:35.8	sandpit in a drab park on the outskirts of Minsk. I wasn't sure she'd show up, but she has. It's taken days to convince her to meet me in this clandestine
1:47.0	way, and we begin in hush tones, twitching over our shoulders.
1:59.0	Almost by accidents that Lana Tignofskaya has found herself running the president of Belarus, and she doesn't know who to trust.
2:02.0	It's no wonder, her husband Sergei has just been jailed on what
2:06.6	people suspect is a fabricated charge leaving her with two young children to look after. It was Sergei who'd been planning to run, ready
2:16.2	to take on President Alexander Lukashenko, the man many fear and who's ruled this country for more than a quarter of a century.
	...

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