EU president calls emergency summit on Belarus elections

Editorial Team

January 12, 2022

“Violence towards protesters is unacceptable and can’t be allowed,” he mentioned.

The 27 EU overseas ministers mentioned on Friday that the elections have been neither free nor honest and that they refuse to simply accept the outcomes of the polls, as introduced by the Belarus electoral fee.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows under.

MINSK, Belarus — A number of thousand manufacturing facility staff took to the streets of Minsk on Monday, demanding the resignation of authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. It was the ninth straight day of protesting towards the outcomes of an election that prolonged his 26-year rule.

Practically 5,000 staff from the Minsk Tractor Works plant, which has been on strike since Monday morning, marched down the streets of Minsk, demanding that Lukashenko step down and cede his publish to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the main opposition candidate.

The official outcomes of the Aug. 9 vote gave Lukashenko 80% of the votes and Tsikhanouskaya solely 10%, however the opposition claimed the vote was rigged.

“Lukashenko is a former president, he must go,” Sergei Dylevsky, the chief of the protest on the Minsk Tractor Works plant, informed The Related Press on Monday. “Sveta (Tsikhanouskaya) is our president, respectable and elected by the individuals.”

Tsikhanouskaya, a 37-year-old former English trainer, entered the race after her husband’s jailing in Belarus. She managed to impress nationwide assist, drawing tens of 1000’s to her marketing campaign rallies.

Massive-scale protests towards the vote outcomes continued even after she left the nation for Lithuania final week, a transfer her marketing campaign mentioned was made underneath duress. The protests have posed the largest problem but to Lukashenko’s iron-fisted rule of the ex-Soviet nation of 9.5 million.

Belarusian authorities initially tried to suppress the rallies, detaining nearly 7,000 individuals within the first days of the protests. Police moved aggressively, utilizing stun grenades and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds, injuring scores of individuals.

Nonetheless, as protests grew and the tough crackdown drew criticism within the West, regulation enforcement shunned interfering with the crowds and appeared all however absent throughout a rally on Sunday that attracted some 200,000 individuals.

Tsikhanouskaya mentioned in a video assertion Monday she was able to facilitate a rerun of the disputed election.

“I’m able to take on the duty and act as a nationwide chief to ensure that the nation to settle down, return to its regular rhythm, to ensure that us to free all of the political prisoners and put together laws and circumstances for organizing new presidential elections,” she mentioned.

Lukashenko bristled on the concept of talks with the opposition, insisting his authorities was the one respectable one, and rejected the thought of repeating the election at a rally in his assist on Sunday. The embattled president informed a crowd of 50,000 that the nation would “perish as a state” in any other case, and denounced the protesters as stooges of overseas masterminds.

Lukashenko visited one other tractor plant on Monday and dismissed the strikes as insignificant. “So, 150 (individuals) at some manufacturing facility, even 200 don’t make a distinction,” the president was quoted as saying by the state Belta information company.

Hundreds of staff from a number of different crops within the meantime gathered outdoors, shouting “We’re not sheep, we’re individuals,” and “Strike!”

Maria Kolesnikova, Tsikhanouskaya’s prime affiliate, attended the gathering and mentioned that “solely the previous president (Lukashenko) stepping down will calm the nation down.”

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