The Belarusian regime has ordered the closure of around 40 NGOs and promised to continue “cleaning up”.

The Belarusian regime liquidated more than 40 NGOs, including human rights organizations, and promised to continue the persecution against them, which the country’s president, Alexandr Lukashenko, called “Bandits” and “foreign agents”.

Belarusian human rights NGO Vesná first reported on Friday on its Telegram account that more than twenty organizations had been liquidated, a number it later updated to “Over 40”.

Illegal NGOs include the Center for Legal Transformation, the Center for Environmental Solutions, the European Dialogue Center, the Belarusian Press Club, the Disability Rights Office, the Legal Information Center “Lawtrend”, the ‘Social film workshop or the Center for Urban Projects and Space Initiatives, according to Vesná.

The Belarusian Ministry of Justice also filed a complaint with the Supreme Court the Association of Journalists (BAJ), whose bank account has been frozen, to liquidate it for allegedly violating NGO legislation.

He also went to the Supreme Court to dismantle the PEN Center, headed by 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature Svetlana Alexievich, member of the Presidium of the Coordination Council of the Opposition in Belarus.

The PEN had recently denounced 621 cultural and human rights violations against cultural figures in the first half of 2021, more than the at least 593 recorded in 2020, according to a report collected by Vesná.

He also said that, As of June 30, there were 526 political prisoners in Belarus, including 39 cultural workers.

Thusday, Lukashenko told a cabinet meeting that “cleaning up” NGOs in Belarus is not easy, as there are around 2,000 in the country who are “non-commercial organizations, bandits and foreign agents in a small country “.

Minsk allowed them years ago on an impulse “democratic“He said, but” now we have realized that he is harm the state“, He underlined, according to the official agency BELTA.

“The cleanup is in progress. Do you think it’s easy? Thousands of people, our people, work there, and most of them have been brainwashed with foreign money. “, Held.

The regime of the authoritarian president, in power since 1994, also advocates a campaign of persecution against independent media and journalists.

As the Association of Journalists said on Monday, police raided 66 media outlets and newsrooms in the past 10 days, in addition to carrying out searches in various NGOs and homes of human rights defenders. In total, according to BAJ, authorities have carried out 107 raids on journalists so far this year.

A total of 33 journalists are currently in prisonsaid the BAJ.

The Belarusian commission of inquiry assured on July 16 that it had information that several NGOs and media had been “Involved in the financing of events” against the Lukashenko regime.

Belarus has been going through a deep political crisis since the presidential elections last August, in which Lukashenko was declared the winner by a wide margin, a result characterized as fraudulent by the opposition and the West.

For several months, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets from various cities across the country to participate in peaceful protests, which were violently suppressed by the police.

(With information from EFE)

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