Football in Belarus: How Fans Hit Tarakan

Dynama Brest fans supported the protests.

In the spring of 2020, when a strict quarantine was introduced in many countries due to COVID-19 and all public events were canceled, the football championship was held in Belarus.

Fans of the football club Dynama Brest were among those who urged their supporters to refuse to visit the stadiums, writes dw.com.

Dummies replaced fans

As one of the leaders of the fan movement Yauhen said, the decision to boycott the games of his favorite team was not easy. "In 2019, our Dynama became the champion of Belarus for the first time in its history, we were preparing many surprises in order to thank the players for this achievement in the new season," says the Brest fan.

At the beginning of March last year, fans of the club still managed to go to Minsk to support Dynama in the victorious match for the Super Cup, but further plans for the season changed due to the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

"In most countries, the championships were suspended then, but in Belarus, the football federation did not do this: after all, the country's authorities called the coronavirus psychosis. Then the fans of the leading clubs themselves decided to abandon active support in the stands, so as not to aggravate the situation and to protect the health of the fans," Yauhen recalls.

As a result, dummies began to appear on Belarusian stadiums' fan sectors to create an entourage for television broadcasts.

The elections will do what the coronavirus did not

Football fans in Belarus decided to return to the stands in the summer of 2020, and this period coincided with the start of the presidential election campaign in the country. Among the traditional chants at the stadium, the slogans "Long Live Belarus!" began to sound, and the fans actively used the national white-red-white symbols and the coat of arms Pahonia.

The Belarusian Football Federation quickly reacted to the fans' demarche. On the pretext of "an unfavorable epidemiological situation," some matches were either postponed to a later date or decided to be held without the presence of spectators.

"The most curious thing is that in July, several players from Brest Dynama really contracted the coronavirus: the club's management asked the federation to postpone the next games, but was refused," says a representative of the Brest fans.

The repression that followed the presidential elections forced active football fans to refrain from visiting the stadiums again, now, for political reasons.

How a fan became a political prisoner

The election campaign of 2020 radically changed the attitude of fans to what is happening in Belarus. According to Yauhen, he and his associates in the football movement had almost no interest in politics before. However, the atmosphere in which the preparations for the elections took place and the authorities' tough reaction to the peaceful rallies of the regime's opponents could not leave the fans indifferent.

In the first days after the elections, many Brest fans were active participants in the protests in the city. They later turned out to be among the volunteers who helped the victims of violence by the security forces.

One of these volunteers was Aliaksandr Babich, who was detained on suspicion of resisting police officers. As it turned out during the trial, the police witness knew Babich precisely as a football fan but did not express any real claims against him during the trial.

Nevertheless, at the end of 2020, a court in Brest sentenced Aliaksandr Babich to imprisonment for 3 years and 6 months. It became known from the lawyers and relatives of the convicted football fan that he was being bullied in the isolation ward: during the checks, Aliaksandr was forced to call himself "an extremist who resisted the authorities." Last week, human rights organizations in Belarus recognized Babich as a political prisoner.

Support for "Miss Belarus"

The Brest fan movement considers this verdict indicative but does not renounce their convictions. Several more active fans remain suspects in other criminal cases, which were brought up on the facts of the events in August-September 2020, when Brest was one of the main places of popular discontent after the presidential elections in the country.

A group of fans decided to demonstrate their solidarity with the victims of repressions with a trip to Minsk to express their support for Miss Belarus 2008 and the former press secretary of the football club Dynama Brest Volha Khizhynkova, who was arrested for 42 days for participating in peaceful protests.

According to Volha, such support is very important for her, and "as long as Dynama Brest have such fans, there is no need to worry about the future of the club."

Until 2021, the football club from Brest was financed for several years by businessman Aliaksandr Zaitsau, who is considered one of Lukashenka's "wallets." Now he left Dynama, and the club became a state institution.