Can Belarusian civil society survive and even pose a threat to the dictatorship?
Since August 2020, Belarusian civil society has been experiencing a crackdown from the Alyaksandr Lukashenka regime that has been unprecedented in the 21st century. After widespread peaceful protests, the authorities launched a systematic extermination of all civil initiatives and NGOs without taking into consideration their political involvement. However, this did not prevent Belarusian civil society from not only existing, but developing in various forms, sometimes in ways completely surprising.
September 27, 2025 -
Zmicier Mickievič
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Hot TopicsIssue 5 2025Magazine
On November 19th 2021, in an interview with the BBC anchor Steve Rosenberg, when asked about the 270 NGOs liquidated since August 2020, Belarusian dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka answered with the following: “We’ll massacre all the scum that you [the West] have been financing. Oh, you’re upset we’ve destroyed all your structures! Your NGOs, whatever they are, that you’ve been paying for … name the United Nations office. Name what it did. The money that was supposed to go to charity financed protests – they hired lawyers and so on. Is that their core business? Or was it partly the Red Cross and so on, name them too. And when you speak about animals [a protection organization – editor’s note] … well, it sounds like a picture, but look at what they did? I am sure that it was a cover story that they were protecting animals, and they received money for their existence and for revolutions here. Not for revolutions, but for rebellions. So don’t hide behind these words, ‘we supported animals here.’”
This is a part of the regime mindset – everything not under the direct control of the authorities is considered a potential threat. However, in previous years officials mainly ignored civil society initiatives and NGO activities until they intruded into Lukashenka’s clan corruption schemes or became involved in political life. But after the 2020 protests, when Lukashenka for the first time in a long time felt a real threat to his power, he decided to destroy any grounds for people to unite outside the framework of state-controlled institutions.
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