Minsk, Belarus

Today was a beautiful spring day - although unseasonably cool, the sun was shining in a cloudless sky and the azaleas are blooming in the backyard.

But life is not so pleasant everywhere. In Belarus, thousands of protesters were marching in Minsk to challenge the recent and discredited presidential elections there. The demonstrators were demanding a re-run of the election, which returned to power for five years a president accused in the West of pursuing Soviet-style policies.

While this is generally not a political blog (occasional teasing of Bush notwithstanding), and while I don't like to discuss international politics because I don't trust the American media which I'm forced to rely upon for most of my information, I came across pictures of the protest and its suppression on a couple of Belarusian blogs. I didn't understand a word of their texts, written in Belarusian with Cyrillic letters, but the pictures told the story well enough.The demonstrators were protesting peacefully and displaying the red-and-white flag of the opposition. As the crowd approached the capital's central square, riot police were lined up on an overpass to intimidate the protesters from marching any further.And then out came the tear gas.The riot police began marching toward the crowd, beating their batons against their shields, breaking the crowd into sections of several dozen each.
The police then began beating the protesters with clubs. The crowd, some of them bloodied, ran screaming from the scene.The police chased rally leaders down side streets of the capital, clubbing them to the ground when they were caught. Paddy wagons cruised the streets to round up detainees.Despite the presence of the media, police smashed one man's face into a security fence as they detained him.Bloodied, their victim was loaded into the paddy wagon with other protesters.And the goons were off in search of new victims.Life can be short, brutish and nasty, and it's easy to forget this on a lovely spring afternoon. The pictures of this incident, while not the only atrocity going on in the world right now and, unfortunately, hardly the worst, manifested the reality and impact of the events for me, and I hope that by sharing them here on this blog I can raise awareness of the specific situation in Minsk, and the general condition around the world.

I thank the Belarusian bloggers, whoever they were, for posting these pictures, and wish them the best of luck in resisting the oppressive regime responsible for this atrocity.