Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko told visitors to an agricultural festival over the weekend that Belarus was a dictatorship of “stability, kindness and justice”, according to state-owned news agency BELTA.
Lukashenko, who has held power for over 30 years and announced in October that he would run for a sixth presidential term in January, made his comments during a speech in Masty, a town in the country’s western Hrodna region, in which he claimed that “despite the lies spread about the Belarusian state”, foreigners “gladly” visited the country.
Belarus, which in July granted visa-free entry for citizens of 35 European nations “to further demonstrate” the country’s “openness and peacefulness”, according to the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, had seen a rise in visitor numbers since then, Lukashenko said, claiming that “about a million people have already seen with their own eyes that Belarus is indeed a dictatorship, … A dictatorship of stability, security, order, kindness and hospitality. A dictatorship of justice.”
Referring to the thousands of political prisoners currently serving long sentences in Belarus, Lukashenko noted that “there are prisoners in every country”, adding that had to at least realise that the decision made to jail them was a “fair” one.
“Any president that will lead the country in the near future” must make sure that Belarus will be “the most just state”, Lukashenko stressed.
The upcoming presidential election, planned for 26 January, is widely expected to be a sham, following Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on dissent following the 2020 presidential elections, in which nearly 1,300 people were imprisoned for their role in anti-government protests and all major opposition parties were banned.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenko’s challenger in the 2020 election who was subsequently forced into exile, has said that the upcoming election would be “conducted in an atmosphere of terror”, and urged Belarusian voters to protest by voting against all the candidates on their ballot.