Ice-cream eating, strategic smiling, removing balaclavas and hacking state tv: Belarus's brave, funny and inventive protestors
Maria Kolesnikova at a rally in Minsk in late August. The flautist thwarted an attempt to deport her by tearing up her passport at the border. Photograph: TUT.BY/Reuters
This is an amazing tale of how the protestors of Belarus have used offline and online tactics, with great ingenuity, to protest against their dictatorial president. It’s also a story from the new website (or “daily link-dose”) Pluralistic from SF writer Cory Doctorow, which deepens his pioneering work with the blog Boing Boing, but accelerates it for edgier times. We have no idea how his mind processes this amount of material every day…
"Europe's last dictator," Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, has been a kind of test-case for the efficacy of various technologically enabled pro-democracy tactics for decades.
Back in 2006, protesters in Minsk challenged his ban on protests by announcing that eating ice-cream was a form of protest, then they showed up and ate ice-cream…and got arrested.
https://users.livejournal.com/litota-/photo/album/2445
They followed this up by announcing that smiling at each other was a form of protest and showed up, smiling, in the same square, and were met with hundreds of riot cops who later rounded up the organizers:
https://boingboing.net/2006/10/05/belarus-smile-mob-or.html
But opposition groups kept organizing, using international online spaces, even after visiting websites hosted outside of Belarus was declared a misdemeanour.
And while the country/state had little technological capacity of its own, it was able to buy turnkey authoritarian services from the likes of the Swedish company Teliasonera and Italian arms-dealer Hacking Team.
With new surveillance gear in place, Lukashenko was able to do things like enumerating the identity of every attendee at a protest, via their mobile phones.
https://charter97.org/en/news/2011/1/12/35161/
But despite this, protests kept growing. After all, Lukashenko is a terrible leader.
It wasn't just the blatantly stolen "elections" – it was flexes like arresting a one-armed man for clapping:
https://loweringthebar.net/2013/01/one-armed-man-arrested-for-clapping.html
And lavish dingbattery like equipping school uniforms with special "anti-cancer pockets":
But these paled in comparison to the substantive bad policies, like an extremely high tax levied exclusively against unemployed people, during a deep recession, called the "Tax on social parasites."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-belarus-protests-idUSKBN15Y0PB
The current Belarusian uprising was triggered by yet another stolen election, but it represents decades of grievances and trauma, loved ones and leader arrested and put to hard labour, torture, privation, and terror.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#walkaway
And the regime seems closer to collapse than at any previous time, thanks to the protesters’ perseverance and endless ingenuity. First, riot cops downed their shields, embraced protesters, and refused to arrest them.
Then, demonstrators started doxing the balaclava-clad, badgeless shock troops, exposing their identities ahead of major protests, inviting the men behind those masks to contemplate their fates if the Lukashenko regime falls.
Most recently, protesters hacked into the state TV channels to broadcast footage of police violence against peaceful demonstrators.
https://twitter.com/BFreeTheatre/status/1309940635646992384
The protestors' accompanying Telegram post read: "If Belteleradiocompany does not want to show people the truth, we will show it."
More here. And here’s the Guardian and the Independent’s updates on the situation in Belarus.