Never in its history has Belarus become a source of conflicts, but today it has to resist the attempts to "shake up" the country. The blitzkrieg as well as the rebellion has failed. That means other methods are being used to break the system including terrorism. And there will be an adequate response to this, too.
The other day radicals threw petrol bombs at the house of Belarusian MP Oleg Gaidukevich. Experts have already called the individual terror a new stage in the aggression against Belarus.
Terror on opponents
The protests have finally left the streets of Belarus, and the picture for reports to sponsors has disappeared along with them. This creates serious tension among European patrons. Despair forces them to go to the extremes; at intervals of several days there was an attempt on the life of journalist Grigory Azarenok and an attack with petrol bomb on the house of politician Oleg Gaidukevich, where he lives with his wife and minor children.
Oleg Gaidukevich, deputy of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of Belarus, Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party:
It took me a while to realize what happened when we saw the bottles, the burnt food, the cat with half of its nose burnt. When the realization came, when we found the fuse, when we found the bottles, when we found all these remnants, it was clear that it was a petrol bomb. I am a lieutenant colonel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who worked for many years in the police. I know very well that it is necessary not to touch the traces of the scene and to call the investigation team, which arrived at the spot and began to work as professionals. That is why I was not afraid of anything, I was surprised to realize that in Belarus it is possible to throw a petrol bomb at a deputy, and I am a deputy I am the leader of the party, so we saw it only on TV in other countries. We must appreciate what we have in our country. If we hadn't saved the country, we would have had the same thing that happened in Odessa, I have no doubt about that. So we have to understand that and not to relax, because I'm sure that if they did it to me there's no guarantee that they won't do it to someone else.
Intimidation of people who openly condemn the attempted coup d'etat in Belarus has been going on for almost a year. They take various forms from online bullying to open manifestations of terror. The culmination of all this was the attempted assassination of members of the President's family.
Victor Baranets, military observer of "Komsomolskaya Pravda", retired colonel (Russia):
The political struggle in Belarus acquires extremist and even gangster forms. When people lack arguments in confrontation with their opponents they use fists, knuckles, guns and so on. All this suggests that the Belarusian opposition is very nervous and has already crossed the line of even elementary decency.
Vadim Gigin, political scientist:
This is part of the radicalization of those who were not able to win first in the political struggle in the elections, then in organizing street protests. This is a manifestation of their denial of what is happening in society, a lack of understanding of their fellow citizens. On the other hand, this is a side effect of stabilization. We can see that the political situation in Belarus is normalizing, and in these conditions, when no internal or external factors help to destabilize the situation, they switch from one tactic to another. Now we are witnessing attempts to introduce real full-fledged terror not in the form of individual terror.
In the current situation, it is important to understand that those who throw petrol bombs are merely pawns in a game of patrons, who remain far from liability. At the same time, European politicians, who pay for their luxurious lives at the expense of the taxes of ordinary citizens in their countries, prefer to ignore such cases. That is the peculiarity of the democratic view in the enlightened Europe.
