Belarus closes down civil society organizations en masse

More than 50 civil society and media organizations in Belarus are now facing closure as the government escalates its crackdown on the country’s NGOs and media outlets.

“It’s a pretty sweeping attack,” said Heather McGill, a researcher on Central Asia and Eastern Europe at Amnesty International. “This is the whole of Belarusian civil society, basically.”

Beyond the threat to their freedom of expression and right to organize, leaders of the groups warn that by dissolving civil society organizations, the government is closing down the critical social services that they provide. The organizations targeted include NGOs that offer support to the elderly and to people living with HIV.

“Many non-profit organizations did work with the issues that the state did not do and, having lost the services of NGOs, ordinary people, including those from vulnerable groups, will suffer,” Svetlana Zinkevich, director at the Office of European Expertise and Communications, told Devex in an email. Her Minsk-based organization, which helps build the capacity of civil society, is among the groups that have been ordered to stop operating.

President Alexander Lukashenko defended his government’s actions in comments last week, arguing that a “mopping-up operation” of civil society groups was necessary to purge the influence of “bandits and foreign agents.”

But Amnesty International, in a statement, said the closures ordered last week were the latest evidence of his government’s “unprecedented and increasingly brutal attack on civic space, all forms of opposition or peaceful dissent.” Those attacks have ramped up dramatically following a wave of peaceful demonstrations against Lukashenko following his disputed reelection last year.

The president, who is closely allied with Russia, has been in power since 1994.

The incidents include the dramatic capture of dissident journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, in late May. A plane they were traveling on from Greece to Lithuania was forced to land in Minsk, supposedly because of a bomb threat. The two were detained and appeared to be coerced into making public admissions of criminal activity. They remain under house arrest.

This month at least a dozen human rights activists were also detained following a series of raids on the offices and homes of activists, civil society organizers, and opposition politicians. That includes the OEEC offices, which Zinkevich said were raided without warning, supposedly under orders of the Financial Investigations Department. She said documents, flash storage drives, and a camera were all seized and that the OEEC’s office remains closed and its bank accounts blocked.

In that environment, Zinkevich said it was not surprising the government would also turn on civil society organizations, ordering groups in the past weeks to wind down their activities without any prior notice or opportunity to challenge the decision.

“We have long received signals from the state media, from officials, that civil society organizations are evil,” she wrote. “So the moment came when they decided to destroy everyone.”

Among the groups ordered to shut down are the nonprofit crowdfunding platform Imena and the human rights group Human Constanta. The targets also include environmental groups and a number of organizations supporting people with disabilities and imprisoned minors, as well as media associations.

McGill said that such organizations have consistently faced difficulty registering with the government and have been liquidated in the past for problems as small as errors in filing paperwork.

“But this is on a whole different scale,” she said, potentially in reaction to the sweeping sanctions the EU imposed on Belarus in June for forcing Protasevich’s flight to land. EU companies are banned from importing goods from Belarus or doing business with Belarusian companies across a range of industries.

“This campaign is obviously aimed at the complete demolition of the country’s third sector, the total destruction of any civic activity and the suppression of any initiative,” the leaders of several human rights and media organizations said in a statement.

As some of the groups wait to see what steps the government takes next, Zinkevich said OEEC would continue its work.

“Civil society is not about seized equipment and documents, not sealed offices and blocked bank accounts,” she wrote. “Civil society is, first of all, people who have worked and are ready to continue working for the benefit of all citizens of Belarus.”