The departure promised to be heartbreaking, distressing too. A one-way trip to the Polish capital that she will make leaving everything behind, carrying with her the uncertainty of exile. And with a fear that only left her during the border crossing: were she going to be arrested again for another arbitrary reason? This was to avoid raising any questions. Humanitarian visa in hand, she then erases any “potentially compromising detail” from her phone, taking with her only what is necessary, even less objects or books classified as “extremist” by the regime. “I was afraid that the border guards would search me”, to drop Daria Tchoultsova.
Long brown hair, angelic face, the 25-year-old Belarusian is not a potential criminal. It is different in the last dictatorship of Europe, where she has just served nearly two years of her life behind bars. The wrongdoing the regime has charged her with? “To have seriously undermined public order”. In his native Belarus, and that of Alexander Lukashenko, autocrat without interruption since 1994, this means exercising his work as a journalist.
On November 15, 2020, with Katerina Bakhvalova, her colleague still imprisoned to this day, Daria Tchoultsova had covered the rally held in memory of an opponent who was beaten to death by regime henchmen. The young woman still remembers the din of the riot police entering the apartment of the building from which she was filming.
This is how Daria, shortly after being released in September 2022, joined Poland, one of the centers of exile, with Lithuania, of tens of thousands of Belarusian dissidents. Is the only way to pursue his vocation without risking a new police raid. In Warsaw, freed from the totalitarian grip, she returned to her work at Belsat, a Belarusian media financially supported by the Polish authorities. “There are still rare journalists in the country, who operate on the sly. I can’t imagine how they can work in such conditions,” says the woman The duty met in November in Warsaw.
Opposition locked up or exiled
They seem far away, these times of jubilation, in the colors of white-red-white, when dislodging the despot of Minsk, in power for more than a quarter of a century, seemed within reach. The scale of the uprising, triggered by the electoral fraud of August 9, 2020, was unprecedented. The level of repression too. Torture, beatings in cells, incessant searches… Dissent has since been locked up or forced into exile; independent media and NGOs liquidated.
The number of political prisoners amounts to more than 1,400, according to the renowned Belarusian NGO Viasna, while critics of the regime who have found refuge abroad continue to be sometimes tracked down, sometimes harassed. Starting with Svetlana Tikhanovskaïa, leader of the opposition exiled in Vilnius, whose trial in absentia opens in Minsk today, Tuesday January 17. She is accused, among other counts, of “conspiracy to seize power”. The regime has therefore recently enacted a law that allows the revocation of citizenship of Belarusians in exile convicted of actions “causing harm to the interests of the nation”.
“There is not much room for optimism about an imminent political change”, underlines Aleś Łahviniec, a political scientist exiled in Poland since the fall of 2021 and program director at the Free University of Belarus, an academy online. Certainly, there is underground resistance in the country. Dozens of acts of sabotage have taken place since February 24 to curb the delivery of Russian military equipment, the Belarusian territory serving as a rear base for the Kremlin.
The initial fervor waned two years later, but the struggle has not ceased for the dissident networks in exile. Pavel Latushka, he claims “not to have taken a single day off” since he defected two years ago. Exiled in Poland, this former Belarusian diplomat and Minister of Culture is trying to maintain pressure on the regime by increasing visits with European officials or by taking advantage of his sources within the regime who pass on tips to him. A member of the “United Transitional Cabinet of Belarus”, an opposition body, he is portrayed as a traitor by the Belarusian authorities. The recurring death threats against him testify to this.
However, since the hijacking of a flight which led to the arrest of a political opponent, in the spring of 2021, he no longer sets foot on a plane, for fear of ending up in the regime’s jails in turn. “Lukashenko wants my skin to set an example for other members of the government”, underlines the man with the serious face, who urges the international community to impose heavier sanctions against the regime.
Cyberdissent
Unable to pound the pavement, the dissidents forced to exodus must reinvent themselves. Before fleeing to Warsaw, at the start of the massive mobilization in the summer of 2020, Yuri Ravavoi, a former Grodno Azot worker, had set up a strike committee within the independent union of the fertilizer production plant of synthesis. But, like many, the one who was only a neophyte trade unionist realized the obvious, according to the salvoes of repression: “In the spring of 2021, we understood that we would never get the many strikers necessary to a new movement, and that we should instead help those who need it to obtain visas and to settle abroad. Or organize financial support for relatives of trade unionists in prison. »
How do you stay relevant to a readership in a country you can’t set foot in anymore? Many independent media forced to leave the country, such as Nacha Niva, the oldest Belarusian-language newspaper, are facing this challenge. “We were the last to leave the country [en 2021], recounts its editor-in-chief, Nastassia Roŭda, in exile in Vilnius. This is what perhaps gave us the opportunity, as journalists, to witness the first waves of repression. And to feel “this fear that you feel in your flesh when you ring the doorbell or an unknown number appears on the phone”.
Telegram encrypted messaging, widely used in Belarus, remains one of the preferred means of communicating with those back home. Nacha Niva continues to lift the veil on the backstage of authoritarian power, as in October, when he revealed the arrival in Belarus of a “hidden mobilization” aimed at increasing military support for the Russian ally.
There is also another front of dissidents, on the Web, which seems to particularly embarrass the regime. That of the “cyberpartisans”, an anonymous collective of volunteer computer hackers, exiled or remained in the country. “Lukashenko uses violence to subdue his people, the cyberpartisan, they use peaceful and technological methods to weaken Belarusian institutions and infrastructures and to reveal the crimes that the regime is carrying out”, explains at the end of the line Yuliana Shemetovets, the spokesperson of the collective.
The targets ? Government sites, databases of the police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or even the Belarusian railway system, paralyzed more than once in the context of the war in Ukraine. Collaborating also with the Belarusian regiment Kastous-Kalinouski or Bypol, a network of former police deserters, these keyboard activists, described as a “terrorist” group by the regime, readily irritate Alexander Lukashenko. Which declared with ingenuity, in March 2022… that “cyberweapons are even more terrifying than nuclear weapons”.