The making of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Belarus’s leader in waiting

‘The European Union needs to be harsher. It needs to be braver,’ Tikhanovskaya tells Oliver Carroll

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya speaking via video message to the United Nations Human Rights Council (AFP/Getty)

It has been six weeks since Alexander Lukashenko wrote off his presidential rival, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, as a “wretched little girl”.

Since then, the former teacher and housewife, has surprised everyone – herself included. Only standing because Lukashenko had jailed her husband, Tikhanovskaya headed a female triumvirate of opposition politicians through an almost perfect campaign. Belarus’s 26-year autocrat claimed a landslide victory in the 9 August vote,  but she almost certainly won it comfortably.

In the grim crackdown that followed, Tikhanovskaya was forcibly removed from the country. Many predicted that would be the end of the road for her and the movement she headed. Instead, Belarus has witnessed a remarkable, sustained and increasingly creative civic awakening.

In exile, the 38-year-old has undergone an equally dramatic transformation, evolving from protest symbol to become a punchy politician in her own right.

“I’ve had to learn a lot, and quickly,” she tells The Independent. “Being separated from my people obviously makes the experience more complicated. But I understand my role very clearly – and that is meeting as many world leaders as I can to tell them the truth about Lukashenko.”

On Friday, Tikhanovskaya was once again ruffling feathers at the United Nations Human Rights Council with a video address urging the international body to react to abuses “in the strongest terms”. The video was interrupted by Minsk’s official ambassador, who said it represented “unacceptable” interference, but Lukashenko’s man was overruled, and the video played to the end.

Today, Tikhanovskaya says she is putting the final touches to a new sanctions list she intends to hand over to international authorities. The list contains the names of officers and officials identified as having “blood on their hands”, she says, and is being compiled in collaboration with activists working to de-anonymise Lukashenko’s men. Removing balaclavas from officers is the latest tactic being employed by protesters in an increasingly uneven fight.

In the 40 days since the disputed elections, protests have moved through several phases. Following the arbitrary terror of 9-12 August came a short-lived euphoria for demonstrators, and the marked retreat of the regime. That ended in late August with the promise from the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of security guarantees for Lukashenko. The country has subsequently fallen into an uneasy stalemate, with both sides digging in for the long haul.  

On the one hand, the regime is showing its teeth with a sustained campaign of intimidation, most especially against key protest leaders. They have arrested all but one of the leadership of Tikhanovskaya’s National Coordination Council. Maria Kolesnikova, the last member of the female presidential triumvirate to remain in the country, was meanwhile abducted – and told she would be removed from Belarus “alive or in pieces”.

But Kolesnikova’s heroic response to the prospect of that forced extradition – ripping up her passport at the Ukrainian border – is an indication of the growing resolve of protesters. Despite the obvious risks, they continue to take to the streets in their hundreds of thousands. In many respects, the authorities’ clumsy and violent interventions seem to be emboldening their spirit.

“I’ll grant you it isn’t a fair battle,” says Tikhanovskaya, “but you’re missing the point if you say Lukashenko is winning and we are losing. The important thing is the will of the people and it isn't about to be broken. Belarusians are the only thing that counts here.”

Yet as the days go on, and as the arrests and the violence increase, the obvious dangers are that largely peaceful protests will morph into an increasingly desperate confrontation. On Friday, a man set fire to himself in front of a police station near Minsk in what appeared to a harbinger of times to come. The unnamed man is in intensive care in critical condition after suffering 90 per cent burns.

The protest leader suggests the “terrible event” was the direct consequence of Belarusians being ignored. “The man wanted to say that we are here, that we want change,” she says. “People are saying, ‘Help us, we don’t know what to do.'”

Tikhanovskaya is keen to emphasise  the “internal” nature of Belarus’s political crisis. But her frustration with the “inadequate” international response – and what she considers to be the wishy-washiness of EU bureaucracy – also shines through.

Yes, my confidence is growing — and it’s growing entirely in sync with my rage about what is happening in Belarus

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya

This week, the European parliament recognised her Coordination Council as the “temporary representative of the Belarusian people”, and refused to recognise Alexander Lukashenko’s claimed victory. At the same time, the move was incremental and late; sanctions appear to have been paused amid internal disagreement, and there has been precious little condemnation of the role Russia is playing in propping up the Lukashenko regime.

“We understand it’s difficult for some Europeans to understand, since the reality of rape, abuse and extermination we are describing is so far away from what they are used to,” Tikhanovskaya says, somewhat pointedly. “But the European Union needs to be harsher. It needs to be braver. Otherwise you are going to see many more people take the kind of action this poor man did.”

Tikhanovskaya now accepts that for now there seems to be little prospect of influencing the position of the key international player in the Kremlin. It was a matter of “extreme sorrow” that Putin had “sided with the dictator over ordinary people”, she says. But what exactly has been agreed between Moscow and Minsk remains "unclear” and support for Lukashenko is not irreversible: “All we know is that there will be a $1.5bn Russian loan, and that it will not be used for the good of the country – but to beat up the Belarusian people, to rape the Belarusian people, and to kill the Belarusian people.”

Tikhanovskaya rejects the prospect of ending the crisis on Russia's preferred terms – ie Lukasehnko’s new constitutional project and fresh, likely rigged elections. According to some reports, the Kremlin is pressing for the process to be completed within a year; Lukashenko, meanwhile, wants two.

“We think a year of more beatings and more rape and more Lukashenko is a year too long,” Tikhanovskaya says. “We can negotiate and reach agreements calmly. What we can’t do is operate without the rule of law.”

The now battle-weary opposition leader suggests the time for gentle diplomacy is ending. Circumstances have forced her to straighten her own spine, she says. The title of her new Instagram channel that premiered this week – prezident.sveta – demonstrates that resolve.

"I was always a soft person, but the situation could not fail to have an impact on me," she says. She has become “harder, more self-aware, and more confident.”

"Yes, my confidence is growing – and it’s growing entirely in sync with my rage about what is happening in Belarus.”