Belarus has temporarily banned most of its citizens from leaving
bbc.com
bbc.com
Obviously this situation in Belarus is a simple legal restriction and not a wall, but I’ve long thought that a sensible constitutional guarantee would be the right to leave the country at any time.
Borders with Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine are a bit more leaky, but one has to be physically fit and logistically prepared to cross, and there is still a risk of being caught. And then what about kids and elders?
So, this is not a legal restriction, but a real ban.
Interesting, it mostly runs along arbitrary forest paths etc, not major rivers or mountain ranges - not naturally easy to police.
I once stayed in a cottage in the Bialowieza forest (one of few bits of primeval forest in Europe). The cottage was at a clearing, and the other side of the clearing was in Belarus.
We never got any trouble for it, but it wasn’t rare to have border patrol appear out of nowhere and kindly enquire what you’re doing.
These days Lukashenko is very unpopular in the country. He falsified elections, his people committed a lot of violence against the innocent. He is putting people in prison, denied the entrance to Belarus for the citizens. It is a very bad time for the country now - many people and businesses are leaving the country for Lithuania, Poland, etc.
He did not do any economical reforms either, and most state companies are almost dead and cannot compete on the market. He totally relies on donations from Russia. Thanks to him Belarus is not attractive to investors. IT businesses, his golden goose, are leaving.
In totalitarian regimes, constitutions aren't worth the pixels they are printed on. Rights guaranteed by laws must be enforced by the judiciary and the executive. But that only happens if (1) cases actually reach a court, (2) that court is independent, and (3) the executive is willing to enforce the court's decisions.
Indeed, according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Belarus, "Citizens [...] have the right to protest against the government." Problem solved?
But here we are, making news out of this :)
Good luck to the Belarusians though!
Does that mean that people can’t go back to their country of citizenship?
Also check this summary if you want more details [0]
[0] https://telegra.ph/Kak-belorusu-vyehat-iz-strany-nazemnym-pu...
Individual liberty is truly a precious thing.
Australian citizens generally cannot leave their country either, for over a year.
Given that Belarus had no COVID lockdowns or restrictions, people there have enjoyed comparatively more freedom over the past year compared to the average Western citizen.
The West also takes down airliners in attempts to apprehend journalists. If you have the wrong political opinions, you can lose your job, and be unpersoned by corporate groups with ties to the Government.
The West no longer has the moral high ground and we should be aware of the propaganda levels of the world we are now living in.
I'm not defending Russia or Belarus. They are mafia states. They are just less sophisticated operators without the global media on their side.
Travel restrictions in the west enjoy wide support and are in response to a global health emergency, not spurious political reasons put in place by someone who appears to be an illegitimate leader.
Your ‘unpersoned’ comment is laughable.
What has changed in the last year to prompt these protests against him anyway?
The obvious answer is nothing, that the agitation is stirred up by the West, perhaps since he didn't bend the knee and agree to COVID lockdowns despite being offered $940 million:
https://eng.belta.by/president/view/belarus-president-unwill...
Meanwhile, lockdown in the West has clearly failed - Sweden and Ukraine, with weak or no lockdowns, have a lower per-capita deathtoll than countries that did lockdown: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
And deaths are only up 6% YoY in Sweden and Ukraine, basically in line with the aging of the population and the effects of a once-a-decade flu variant (similar in mortality to Swine Flu wave in 2009).
The West is trying to start another color revolution in Belarus, as they did in Ukraine, where the US Government officials were on the street handing out sandwiches to protestors.
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/1213/Russia-crie...
Is Ukraine better off since their revolution? Yes, I think so (I live here). Would Belarus be better off without Lukashenko? Possibly. However, since 2014, several million Ukrainians have fled the country to work in the EU, and a large chunk of territory has been lost.
I'm suggest that there are layers of deception and propaganda at work here that we, as intelligent IT personnel, should be aware of if we want to comment on these articles.
If you see travel restrictions during a pandemic as tyranny, I'm not sure I can help you.
Scroll through the timeline of these Belarusians, who are literally risking their lives by exposing and combating these situations. Really take some time to grasp the situation there.
https://twitter.com/HannaLiubakova https://twitter.com/franakviacorka https://mobile.twitter.com/Tsihanouskaya
The current dictator has a lot of supporters, and I mean real supporters, not people “supporting” him at gun point.
It is similar I think to the situation in the US where poor people will sometimes vote against their financial interests to support an identity.
When everyone realises their mistake there is no turning back for several years to come.
The US calls Maduro a "dictator" despite being elected. The reason the US does is simple: money (which uses US ideological politics as a means-to-an-end), since he specifically stated his purpose after the death of Chávez: "Compatriots, I am not here out of personal ambition, out of vanity, or because my surname Maduro is a part of the rancid oligarchy of this country. I am not here because I represent financial groups, neither of the oligarchy nor of American imperialism ... I am not here to protect mafias nor groups nor factions. IOW, because he wouldn't sell-out his own people or his own country, so he's been marked for death/removal, his people marked for sanctions, and Fox News leads the charge smearing the man and the country to make some vampiric rich Americans more money.
I stated that Venzuala was another example where "It is similar I think to the situation in the US where poor people will sometimes vote against their financial interests to support an identity."
In Venezuala's case: poor people would rather support unsustainable state subsidies and industries, at the long term cost of running their economy and currency into the ground.
Venezuela is a dictatorship whether or not Guaido won the last election. It's a dictatorship because the government took enough steps that it was impossible for anyone but Maduro to win.
Masses of gullible idiots take much longer to realize (if ever because of ego protection) it was a bad idea after-the-fact, while students of history saw it coming. This is why direct "democracy" is a terrible idea. Governance by popularity is stupid. Ask Socrates.
I’ll just leave that thought hanging there.
NSDAP goose-stepped into office without winning a plurality of votes, almost like what happens in other countries with Electoral Colleges.
While Lukashenko had some support prior to Aug 2020 election, it dropped to <5% at very best following his ruthless attack and torture of citizens and peaceful protestors.
The only people supporting him now are siloviki, i.e. military and police heads who directly benefit from him remaining in power. Although many within the police elites wish him out as well.
State TV was not very popular even when I lived there some 20ish years ago, and now everyone and their grandma gets their news from Telegram. Telegram usage dropped a bit because many are afraid of having it on their devices, but it is still by far the most popular way of getting news.
It's really hard to estimate the number of those who continue watching state TV. The least educated and people with disabilities watch easy-to-reach Russian propaganda channels as much if not more. Those are at least captivating ;-).
Coup would've already happened if it could, there is very little chance for it now. Lukashenko has spent decades surrounding himself with loyalist.
With silence and little pressure from Europe and the US towards both Belarus and Russia (apart from symbolic "concerns"), things are unlikely to change.
As long as Putin is in power, Lukashenko will remain in power.
There are many political points for Putin to gain within Russia by annexing Belarus, so that's something that could very well happen in the next few months.
Putin and Lukashenko have had several meetings in regards to Belarus integration over the last few months, with Lukashenko getting $1.5B in donations to support his regime after these meetings. So this seems like the likely scenario. And the time frame is much shorter <12mo.
But it won't happen until Lukashenko thinks there is benefit for Lukashenko. On the bottom line, he doesn't care if it benefits Putin or not.
I heard this narrative before, and it strikes me as odd that you would find enough people to bully its own nation into submission - physically in the streets.
But of course that happened in Poland too, where Russian was never a widely spoken language, so clearly it’s possible.
I would like you to pause there for a moment and suspend what you already know to be true and factual. Just consider that this analysis does not explain the popularity of Republicans among the rural poor, but it does allow Democrats to explain this inconvenient fact away.
The sad reality is that neither party actually cares for the poor and working class, but at least the Republicans are honest about it. The rural poor generally know this, and this is why Clinton lost. They did not feel her to be an honest person.
He knew that of course, otherwise why did he jailed all the opposition candidates right before elections?
> And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Apropos to nothing, but it feels like mainstream Western media shut up pretty quick about Myanmar when it became evident that peaceful protest wasn't a viable strategy.
Moving will be easier if citizens will be able to carry some savings.
E.g.: people moving from HK to the UK are usually converting their HK$ to a cashier of foreign and crypto currencies.. Belarus and Hong Kong do not have the economy of North Korea
As a practical matter, it seems much easier, IMO, to restrict persons leaving than returning. It's also more flexible. Some number of people will leave, either illegally or via legal exceptions. So the policy has a pressure relief value. Conversely, a useful entry restriction demands much stricter application, which is likely to quickly crumble when your own citizens are trying to re-enter, especially in larger numbers as compared to a regime where they were restricted from leaving in the first place.
You simply deny the validity of their travel documents.
China does this all the time:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-deportations-ex...
Airlines really do not want an entire aircraft refused landing because of one person. All the pre-departure paperwork procedures exist to prevent this from happening. Airlines won't go along with "just board them anyways" schemes unless forced to do so under threat. If they do cooperate (or are forced to) it gives the destination country cause to void that airline's licenses without risk of reciprocal sanctions against its own airlines. Dragging commercial airlines into a political dispute like this won't work.
Which reminds me, many nations, such as the U.S., have domestic laws which would prevent denying re-entry to citizens. The airplane example isn't the best because there are many technical ways to stop inbound air traffic[1]; ports of entry at land borders, not so much.
[1] Stopping outbound air traffic is even easier as a technical matter.
Edit: I definitely meant East, not West. It's a small but important distinction.
But it reminds me of the best airport in the world, now closed, Tegel. <5 minutes from the taxi to the plane if you're good.
If all sources of information are feeding you with propaganda, public institutions are deeply corrupt and your wages/retirement is propped by petro dollar you get people supporting Putin.
What the West should be doing is to support Ukraine defending their territory. Instead, they freeze conflict for 5+ years without resolution.
A Russian dev I knew mildly supported Putin, but he was in Canada to do dev work due to limited opportunities back home. We talked about Putin grabbing VKontakte and corruption etc..
They guy was very smart but the cognitive dissonance of him not realizing that Putin is literally the 'King of Corruption' that essentially supports and enables all of those terrible things is literally why he had to leave Russia.
But as long as 'Putin is Strong' (or appears to be) - they like him.
I've lost a lot of respect for Russians since 2010, in much the same way I lost a big chunk of respect for many Americans during the Trump era. It's one thing to be 'pragmatic' and accept Putin as the 'lesser of other evils' or to not understand business and therefore believe that Trump is a 'genius businessman' ... but it takes just a tiny bit of self-awareness to see past the stupidity.
Putin is extremely corrupt, not directly tied to the Mafia but essentially it's under his umbrella because he enables it.
If Putin was an actual 'Patriot' he would be viciously going after corruption, instead of just mouthy oligarchs and murdering journalists, he'd be putting top corrupt officials in jail and trying to transform the dour expectation that Russians have that their 'Leaders are Corrupt and That's The Way It Is'.
The fact that a leader can almost openly murder opposition opponents and journalists, and intelligent, educated people just believe the propaganda is staggering.
I had dinner with a nice, educated Russian girl who seemed surprised when I illustrated to her all of the shenanigans of corruption at the Sochi Olympics, as if it was the first she had heard of it.
It's understandable that uneducated rural people with no access to information buy into propaganda. But it's unacceptable that urbane, educated, Russians support that guy. They'll reap what they sew - the same goes for everyone else.
I have team members stuck in Belarus, they're pragmatic about it. Lukashenko doesn't have hugely popular support but I'm feeling that Belarussians are more chill than Russians. They're also pretty much ethnically Russian, so there's that and the economy is naturally tied to Russia.
It's feeling a little bit like 1985.
You have to realize that lots of Russians still remember gangs of actual criminals roaming around in the 1990s and being afraid for their physical safety; food shortages and everything else from the late 80s through to the end of the 90s; inflation that made your savings disappear before your eyes (and shortages/limits of all physical goods which meant there was no way to escape it). My grandparents had enough savings to buy four cars at the start of inflation (quite a bit of savings at the time), and after the inflation they ended up being able to only afford two couches with that money. And that's just the 80s/90s.
Historically, Russia has a very bloody history and suffered greatly in WWII (and generally has suffered the highest percentage of losses in any violent conflict); the attitude a lot of people have there is "better the devil you know than the one you don't". And it checks out historically - the Revolutions that have historically been attempted in Russia didn't exactly lead to anything good for the average person.
So while yes, all of the things you outlined are evidence of a cancer in the system, a lot of people still see it as better than the alternative(s) that they tasted in the 90s - which is why the situation persists. You're starting to see pushback from the generation(s) that grew up after the Union collapsed and that have no memories of the 90s, but otherwise the collective pain & memories are quite strong.