MALADZYECHNA, Belarus — The half-million Belarusians who can’t find work in their country’s stumbling Soviet-style economy face an array of hard choices: register with the state employment exchange, which will force them to take “public work” for a pittance, pay $250 for failure to register or risk being jailed for taking part in a wave of protests against the labor law.
Yevgeny Radkevich, a 19-year-old unemployed repairman, chose to protest. Recently freed from a seven-day jail stay after being arrested, he thinks he did the right thing.
“We have to go out and speak of our dissatisfaction, so that the government doesn’t consider us to be slaves,” Radkevich told The Associated Press in Maladzyechna, a down-at-the-heels city of 95,000 some 35 miles northwest of the capital, Minsk.
Over the past two months, such protests have broken out across the country of 9.5 million, sometimes attracting thousands — an unusually widespread, persistent show of opposition in an authoritarian country where dissent is generally suppressed.
The initial protests focused on the labor law but have grown to encompass calls for the resignation of President Alexander Lukashenko, whom critics call Europe’s last dictator.
There were no arrests at the early protests, and Lukashenko tried to stifle the rising discontent by announcing that collecting the $250 tax would be suspended. But demonstrations continued, with more than 300 people arrested so far in March alone.
Lukashenko this week sharply raised tensions by claiming that Western intelligence agencies were using a “fifth column” inside the country to cause unrest, and he vowed Friday not to let Belarus repeat the fate of neighboring Ukraine.
In 2014, Ukraine’s Russia-friendly leader Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in the face of huge popular protests.
Minsk city authorities on Friday banned a large demonstration planned for today, but it was unclear if activists would be deterred by the risk of arrest or clashes with police.
The Belarusian KGB has already detained 26 opposition activists this week and claimed that weapons including grenades had been seized in apartment searches.
The human rights organization Amnesty International warned Friday that the protest must be “allowed to go ahead unhindered by excessive use of police force or arbitrary detentions.”
The law that has galvanized anger against Lukashenko says anyone who works less than six months in a year and does not register with the labor exchange must pay $250. Although that’s a huge amount in Belarus, an estimated 470,000 unemployed people have not registered with the exchanges, whereas only 30,000 have.
