December 12, 5:00pm (Kyiv, GMT + 2)
Online discussion "How we want to live. Protests and the prospect for the future in Belarus"
Belarusians have been protesting for more than three months now, demanding new elections and respecting basic democratic rights. The power apparatus of longtime autocrat Alexander Lukashenko is trying to suppress the will to protest through repression and excessive violence from the security forces. To date, more than 30,000 people have been detained, nevertheless, the protests continue, acquiring new forms and ways of expression.
In this tense and emotionally difficult time, is there an opportunity to think about how life in our country with a new president should or could look like? How would we like to live? What kind of future do we need to design?
Many Belarusians should ask themselves these questions. And we discussed them during our online discussion — not in philosophical or economic terms, but at the level of ordinary conversation.
Moderator: Alexey Bratochkin — historian, ECLAB professor (Minsk, Belarus)
Co-moderator: Ingo Petz — journalist (Berlin, Germany)
Participants:
• Tatiana Gatsura-Yavorskaya — Chairwoman of the human rights association "Zveno", organizer of the festival of documentary films about human rights "Watch Docs Belarus".
• Boris Goretsky — Deputy Chairman of the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ).
• Andrei Khadanovich — poet, translator, president of the Pen Center in Belarus in 2009-2017, participant and organizer of yard concerts in August-November 2020.
The discussion was organized in cooperation with S. Fischer Stiftung.