A Tattered Rag For Lukashenko

There's nowhere to run.

On the Day of Will in Vilnius, Belarusians walked along the streets under white-red-white flags. In Warsaw sang songs "Krambambuli". In Kiev, President Zelensky delivered a congratulatory speech in Belarusian. In Prague, flowers were laid on the graves of the two presidents of the Rada BNR. In Brussels, a huge national Belarusian flag was unfurled in the European Parliament. Meanwhile, in distant Pyongyang, Lukashenko spent time with Umka, Kolya and Kim Jong-un.

He signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the DPRK (strange, why hasn't such a treaty been signed with Un's relatives for 30 years of dictatorship?). He gave his like-minded friend a machine gun (probably the same one without a horn, from a helicopter) and marshmallows and bread, and in return he received a vase and a saber - next time he will surely fly a helicopter over the people and wave his saber. Meanwhile, his son Nikolai fulfilled Putin's order and laid flowers at the monument to the North Koreans who died in the war with Ukraine. And the white spitz was either eaten and served, or behaved so quietly that it didn't even make it into the official chronicle.

I have long noticed this strange tendency: for Belarusians, March is a very important month filled with holidays and protests. Exactly 30 years ago, on the Day of Will, the very Minsk Spring began - a series of actions that continued every year thereafter. March 15 - Constitution Day, March 25 - Voli Day, April 26 - "Charnobylskiy Shlyakh". The Young Front members of the nineties started the spring even earlier: they held their actions "I Love Belarus" on February 14, and it was always fun and unusual. And since 1997, April 2 - the day of signing the treaty on the union state, when Belarusians came out to defend their independence - was added to the indispensable protest marches.

Every year law enforcers tried to disperse these actions. They used APCs and water cannons in the center of Minsk on the Day of Will. They beat to death protesters marching to the Russian Embassy on April 2. They threw the participants of "Charnobylská shlach" into prisons. But the Belarusians still came out. Every year, without passes. Spring is the time of our protests, our history, our flag, our unity. And March is a special month for us. Because the Day of Will is the main holiday of Belarusians. Even if people are beaten and imprisoned for its celebration.

And Lukashenko has been doing completely different things in March all these years. Like North Korean friendship with sabers and marshmallows. In 1996, when the Minsk Spring was beginning, Lukashenko had an important foreign visit - to Tyumen. And the then governor of the Tyumen Region Leonid Roketsky simply refused Lukashenko an audience at first, making him nervous in the reception room. Perhaps it worked later as a reflex: seeing free Belarusians in the streets with the onset of March, Lukashenko recalled his own humiliation when even the Siberian governor did not receive him.

In the spring of 1998, Lukashenko fraternized with Ali Khamenei in Iran - the brothers complained to each other about the United States and the unipolar world. At that time Moscow was afraid to cooperate with Iran, and Lukashenko had already become a world pariah after not even one single term of legitimacy, so the meeting with the ayatollah turned into a discussion of fraudulent schemes of supplying Russian weapons to Iran through Belarus with "made in Belarus" stamps. Later, these schemes will be applied on a large scale, giving rise to a bunch of memes like Belarusian shrimps.

In the spring of 1999, Lukashenko hugged Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. In the spring of 2000, he did the same in Dushanbe with Rakhmon. A year later, he swore eternal love and friendship to the Chinese Communists. In 2002, I enjoyed the views of the golden statue of Turkmenbashi in Ashgabat turning after the sun. And so almost every spring - Iran, Venezuela, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, China. The sight of Belarusians marching through the streets under white-red-white flags, and even in combination with the words "Day of Will" forced him to get out of his seat in the bunker and flee somewhere far away from our latitudes and hide in the safe arms of other like-minded dictators. By the way, few of them are still alive today. And there is nowhere to run to. The world map for Lukashenko is shrinking like a shagreen skin. In fact, it is already hanging like a torn rag on the wall.

And for Belarusians, on the contrary, the map is getting bigger. Now the Day of Will is celebrated all over the world. More precisely, in all countries where there are Belarusians. And Belarusians are everywhere now. Such a time: the world cannot do without us.

Irina Khalip, especially for Charter97.org.

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