Six months after the mass protests began in Belarus, there were nationwide raids on journalists and human rights defenders.
The aim is to determine how the protests were financed in late summer and autumn, the state investigators said on Telegram today. According to various media reports, there were house searches with individual arrests in all major cities in the country.
The Wesna Human Rights Center was also affected. The organization said that phones and devices were confiscated. The activist Valentin Stefanowitsch said: „That is the logic of repression – at the beginning they come to the politicians, the activists and then to the journalists and human rights activists.“
Raids at journalists‘ association
There were also raids on the Belarusian Association of Journalists. Its chairman, Andrej Bastunez, was taken away by the police, but was later released, it said. The organization repeatedly criticized the actions of the authorities against media representatives.
The authoritarian leadership had repeatedly claimed that the demonstrations after the presidential election in August were funded from abroad. For weeks, tens of thousands of people had regularly protested against the election, which was viewed as fraudulent. Protesters have been arrested en masse. Many complained of police violence. Recently there have been minor protests in residential areas.
