[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=150&v=9beT9tt8IwU”][vc_column_text]The presidential election in Belarus came to an end, so did the ‘loose of democracy’. The announced freeze of sanctions and EU top officials’ putting aside the differences with Lukashenka have given a free hand to the regime.
Now Belarusian activists are under close supervision of law enforcement agencies.
The police are calling them in for so-called ‘preventive’ conversations.
“They did not threaten, they just asked whether I was present [at the post-election protest], whether I said something into a megaphone. I told them I am no orator, but I would tell something if I was able to,” Leanid Kulakou, an activist of the campaign ‘European Belarus’, said.
The police are also hunting for members of the movement ‘For Freedom’, who recorded numerous violations during observing the election and then filed complaints. Some activists from Maladzechna and Slutsk are under surveillance as well. The police even phoned the families of independent observers.
“When [mother] asked: “Why are you after my daughter?”, they answered: “We need to solve the question. ” What question? I think it is linked to the fact that I was an observer at the elections and wrote a sufficient number of complaints of all the violations I witnessed,” Alena Hayduk, a representative of campaign ‘The Right of Choice’, told Belsat.
Yury Melyashkevich, an independent observer and coordinator of the movement ‘For Freedom’, who protested against election violation was literally driven out of a polling station in Minsk.
According to independent observers , casting ghost ballots and endless carousel voting turned out to be hallmarks of the election- 2015. At the same time, Miklós Haraszti, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus, commended that protests against the perceived flaws of the presidential election in the country were not met with violence as in previous cases.
But it is just the beginning of exerting pressure, democratic activists warn.
Tatsiana Ulasenka, belsat.eu[vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
