At the same time as Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko is meeting with Vladimir Putin in Russian Sochi today, the Belarusian opposition continues to seek support from EU countries.
Today, one of the opposition’s leading figures, Olga Kovalkova, is in Stockholm for a meeting with Foreign Minister Ann Linde.
To Ekot, she says that Lukashenko’s harshness towards the opposition is a sign of weakness – rather than strength.
He, Lukashenko, no longer has the legal means to stay in power. The only legal way there is through elections, says Olga Kovalkova, one of the leaders of the Belarusian opposition.
“And we won that election” says Olga Kovalkova, who is convinced that if the votes were counted correctly after the election on August 9, the country’s president would be Svetlana Tichanovskaya, not Alexander Lukashenko, who was officially declared the winner with 80 percent of the vote.
And that’s why, she says, he’s putting all his political opponents in jail, or forcing them out of the country, because he’s afraid of them.
Olga Kovalkova herself has for some time its base in the Polish capital Warsaw. As one of the leaders of the opposition’s coordination council, she was sentenced to ten days in prison at the end of August, for holding an illicit meeting.
One evening she was picked up from the Minsk detention center, put in a car with a hood over her head and driven to the Polish border.
Since then, just like Lukashenko’s main challenger in the election, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, she has been conducting her opposition work in exile. Today, she meets with Sweden’s Foreign Minister Ann Linde in Stockholm to talk about the opposition’s view of the situation in Belarus.
Olga Kovalkova says that she does not have any illusions when it comes to President Alexander Lukashenko.
He is not a person who relinquishes power voluntarily. But the process that started in Belarus, it can not be stopped, she says. It is now happening at all levels.
What remains is an attrition campaign, says Olga Kovalkova.
– To make everyone understand that power must be based on the interests of the people, not on the interests of an individual.
Source: ICELAND NEWS