Belarus wants to copy repressive LGBTQ+ policies of neighboring Russia, activists say

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) – As police raided the home of a gay couple in the Belarusian capital of Minsk and brutally beat them, officials made no secret that the attack was accompanied by similar moves in neighboring Russia.

The students, Andrei and Sasha, said the security forces wanted them to open their smartphones and provide the names of “gays from Minsk and Moscow.”

“They hit our heads on the door frame, threatened to report us to the university and said this was the beginning,” said Andrei, 20, who like other gay and transgender Belarusians interviewed by the Associated Press insisted on being identified only. his first name due to safety concerns.

“They wanted to expose the 'underground network' of gay people in Belarus, following the example of Russia,” he said of the autumn attacks. “They openly told us that if it is banned in Russia, it should be banned in Belarus as well.”

Belarus decriminalized homosexuality in 1994 after the fall of the Soviet Union, but the conservative country under authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko does not recognize same-sex marriage, and there are no laws protecting LGBTQ+ rights.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has adopted draconian laws limiting LGBTQ+ rights in recent years, and neighboring Belarus is poised to follow suit, proposing legislation to ban “gay propaganda.” While still to be interpreted in Belarus, the Russian version prohibits any legalization of LGBTQ+ activities and non-traditional sexual relations.

But even before the measure was drafted, life has worsened for the LGBTQ+ community in Belarus, rights advocates say.

They say 32 people have been arrested and beaten in seven cities in the past three months, including 10 transgender or non-binary people and activists. Some were released after questioning, fined and allowed to emigrate, he said, and many are still in prison, facing charges of “distributing pornography” and up to four years in prison.

Many people are likely to be arrested but may be afraid to contact lawyers, according to LGBTQ+ rights group TG House Belarus.

Lukasjenko “uses repression against the LGBTQ+ community in order to gain some kind of approval from the Russian authorities and build support among the citizens of Belarus,” said the group's coordinator, Alisa Sarmant.

“To a large extent, it's a carbon copy of what's happening in Russia, but in Belarus all these racist practices are taking ugly and harsh forms,” ​​Sarmant said.

Moscow has close ties with Minsk, using Belarusian territory as a base for an invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Last year, Russia's Supreme Court successfully overruled an LGBTQ+ activist, designating an “international LGBT organization” as an extremist group.

“We will also have to take similar measures,” said Natalya Kochanova, Lukashenko's close adviser and speaker of the upper house of parliament.

“We have family values, traditions that we pass down from generation to generation — family traditions, Orthodox Christianity,” he said, echoing the Kremlin line.

After Russia banned gender reassignment last year, transgender people in Belarus began to have problems, although the procedures were not prohibited. According to Sarmant, the government this year has rejected more than 80% of those who want to be officially recognized through gender verification procedures and to change their gender marker on official documents. By comparison, 10%-15% were rejected in 2020, he said.

Among other issues, he cites a “catastrophic shortage” of hormone therapy, degrading medical procedures and politically motivated persecution.

LGBTQ+ activists took part in the mass protests that swept Belarus in 2020 after Lukashenko won a sixth term in elections that the opposition and the West denounced as rigged. The authorities responded with brutal violence, arresting some 65,000 people over the next four years.

There are approximately 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski. Many jailed opposition leaders and activists have spent more than a year in solitary confinement, without medical assistance.

As the divide grows, LGBTQ+ people are leaving Belarus, seeking asylum abroad.

Tania, a 39-year-old transgender woman, told the AP that she was arrested twice for following dissident sites that were considered dangerous and for supporting Ukraine, adding that she was beaten and electrocuted in custody. Finally he fled the country.

During the last raid on his apartment, the security forces broke his teeth and two ribs, put him in jail for 12 days and ordered him to turn himself in on camera, he said.

“The torture in the prison continued day and night,” he said. “I was humbled. They try to stick a taser in my rectum or put it in my private part. … In a country where terrorists rule, you agree with the government's policy, or you have little chance of survival without hormone therapy.”

Marat, a 37-year-old transgender man, told the AP that authorities demanded last year that he kneel down and change his documents to return the gender marker he was assigned at birth. At the time, he said, he had “toned muscles and had grown a beard.”

“I couldn't believe that the doctors wanted to restore everything to the way it was and this nonsense is happening in the 21st century,” he said, adding that he tried to intervene but ended up fleeing to France with his four children. .

Lukashenko, who has run Belarus in an iron fist for three decades, has publicly mocked homosexuals. After Germany's foreign minister publicly called him “the last dictator in Europe” in 2012, Lukashenko responded, “It's better to be a dictator than a homosexual.”

All independent LGBTQ+ groups are closed in Belarus, security forces regularly raid nightclubs in Minsk where underground parties are held, and lawyers say the KGB forces members of the public to cooperate.

“Intimidation, arrests and kidnappings have been used for years in Belarus to create a so-called 'LGBTQ+ database' and declare the entire social group dangerous,” said Pavel Sapelka of the Viasna Center, the country's most prominent rights group.

In April, the Ministry of Culture expanded its definition of pornography to include “non-traditional relationships,” meaning anyone with such material could be prosecuted and face up to four years in prison.

“Belarus must end these cruel amendments and stop the mock prosecution of LGBTQ+ people,” said Anastasiia Kruope, assistant Europe and Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Rights activists say LGBTQ+ people in Belarus continue to face social discrimination, noting the high rate of suicide in the community.

“The government's policy has a particularly strong impact on young LGBT+ people, who have been living for four years under the conditions of a hypocritically constructed 'sterile' environment, the Russian agenda and the constant dissemination of hate speech,” according to the final report. per month by the rights organization Justice Initiative.

The law being prepared ahead of next month's presidential election aims to punish anyone who promotes “non-traditional sexual relations, transgenderism (or) sexual harassment.”

TG House Belarus started a petition campaign against the law, collecting 33,000 signatures. Sarmant suggests that the latest attack was “revenge of this campaign to get everyone to hide, fear, and—best of all—keep quiet.”

Andrei and Sasha, whose house was attacked, said that if the bill becomes law, they will leave Minsk rather than “wait for the sentence.”