Belarus: Harassment and threats are becoming widespread
The Belarusian opposition has a new fun - recalling deputies. The electoral system in Belarus is purely majoritarian, so voters in his district can recall a deputy by following a number of procedures established by the Electoral Code. At least theoretically they can. Because no one has managed to do this so far, and this time it’s unlikely that they will succeed, it’s a very tricky procedure.
Initiating a revocation process is easy. To do this, all that is needed is the signatures of 150 people for holding a meeting of voters, at which an assessment of the deputy’s activities will be given and a decision will be made to initiate a recall. Next, the chairman of the local council sets a date for the meeting (by the way, he may not, but in general at this stage everything is simple). The meeting must include at least 300 people. Considering the level of politicization of Belarusian society, there should be no problems with this either. The problems begin further when the initiative group created at this meeting begins collecting signatures for the recall of the deputy. The signatures must be at least 20 percent of the list of voters in the district. A typical constituency is 60-70 thousand citizens with the right to vote and, accordingly, it is necessary to collect at least 12-15 thousand signatures, and better yet, much more, because there may also be surprises during the counting. For example, for presidential candidate Valery Tsepkalo, out of 160 thousand submitted, about 75 thousand remained recognized. In general, the bar has been raised high and if anyone can pass this stage, it will be very few. And then the question is put to a vote, and we were once again convinced on August 9 how they can count votes in Belarus.
So why all this if there is practically no chance of recalling a deputy, and the parliament itself in the Belarusian system of government is, to put it mildly, not a very important body? The answer is simple - whatever the child amuses himself with, as long as he doesn’t cry. After the failure of the first street onslaught, the mass of protesters needed to be occupied with something so that they would not relax and become despondent. So we came up with an activity. There are a lot of deputies, the procedure is complicated, there will be enough work for a long time.
There is, however, a problem - some, as usually happens in times of revolution, chose, instead of a boring and hopeless procedure, to fight parliamentarians with completely non-legal methods - bullying and threats, which are already sometimes beginning to be put into practice. 23-year-old “Miss Belarus – 2018”, Lukashenko’s favorite and deputy from one of the Minsk constituencies Maria Vasilevich, yesterday her car was smashed by vandals. What Vasilevich deserved such an attitude is unclear. She was one of the few who personally apologized to traumatized protesters after visiting them in hospital.
Recently, a video of deputy Igor Marzalyuk, who was walking along Independence Square and looked very drunk, went viral on the internet. Few people like Marzalyuk. A master of toadying, a visionary historian and one of the developers of the modern version of the official ideology, in general, he is an unsympathetic figure. Then, of course, many laughed, but the truth turned out to be not funny at all - that day Marzalyuk suffered a stroke. Hunted down.
The latest incident happened with deputy Svetlana Shutova, with whom I personally fought for a deputy mandate last year. She was sent an anonymous message that she had to hand over her parliamentary mandate in three days, otherwise “we’ll kill you later.” Hello daughter." Shutova is not the brightest of parliamentarians, but she is not a bad person and definitely does not deserve such treatment.
Such cases have become widespread in post-election Belarus. Threats and insults come not only to deputies, but also to members of election commissions, security forces and simply people who have publicly declared their support for Lukashenko. The other side also sometimes says too much, but does not stoop to a mass campaign of harassment.
For Belarusian nationalists, such behavior is not new. I myself regularly faced their insults and threats every time I crossed the path of their forced Belarusization campaign. But here there is a completely different scale and habits. Maybe those who see the protruding ears of the Ukrainian 72nd TsIPSO behind this persecution are right?
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