Civil Society: From house checks and criminal cases to unprecedented growth of volunteering and donations

Vadim Mozheyko

Summary

In 2020, civil society organizations (CSOs) of Belarus were powerfully reinforced by tens of thousands of volunteers. Millions of euros in donations were raised. Significant initiatives were launched, including relief foundations and proto trade unions. Many CSOs were subject to repression, as civic activism was often treated as a crime, and crowdfunding platforms were closed.

The CSO-state communication framework is being ruined amid the political crisis. Public officers consider interaction dangerous, while public activists regard it as immoral.

Trends:

Public activism as a widespread crime

Belarusian authorities have never perceived independent CSOs as friends or allies. In 2020, civil activism began to be treated as a crime. It is enough to be a member of the Coordination Council or the Union of Belarusian Students to be interrogated or to go to jail.

Repressions (searches, seizure of equipment, criminal cases and arrests) hit many CSOs, including the St. Hubert Children’s Hospice of Grodno, Press Club, Office for the Rights of People with Disabilities, Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) and Viasna Human Rights Center. A similar approach is applied to new local initiatives guided through local Telegram chat rooms: instead of supporting grassroots self-organization, they are subjected to unmotivated repression, and the administration of local chat rooms is considered a crime.

This all is a result of the legal default. Anything can be recognized as illegal or extremist regardless of the letter and intent of the law. The announced adoption of the law on foreign agents, which copies Russia’s worst practices of restricting activities of CSOs, can expand the application of repressive tools.

Despite this pressure, CSOs’ human capital has been growing as never before: tens of thousands of people are contributing their efforts towards the common goal. At first, people massively volunteered to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, joining the ByCovid-19 civic initiative, which demonstrated the strong potential of CSOs. Experienced activists (Andrei Strizhak, Anton Motolko, etc.) chose the right time for the country to provide inputs to cope with the most difficult tasks, in particular, by raising funds, purchasing and producing personal protection means and medical equipment, and delivering them to health professionals that needed them the most.

In less than a month, ByCovid-19 began cooperating with the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. A UNICEF representative in Belarus said that the Fund’s offices only cooperated “with organizations that had an extensive organizational capacity and a consistently good reputation.” “The results achieved by ByCovid-19 give us the right to consider it a reliable peer partner in the Belarusian civil sector,” he said.1

With the beginning of the presidential election campaign (May 2020), people not only joined the initiative groups of presidential candidates, but also started civic initiatives, (Honest People, Golos, Zubr, etc.). The Human Rights Activists for Free Elections campaign shows this dynamics: 1,800 volunteers in 2020 to compare with 240 in 2019.2

Under the enormous post-election pressure, volunteers began gathering near detention centers. Detainees’ families were helped in searching for their disappeared relatives. The released detainees were met at the doors, provided with medical and psychological assistance, fed, and driven home.

After the election, many of the new activists did not join any of the existing organizations and did not form large associations, but they did engage in building local communities. In the previous years, neighborhoods organized celebratory parties every now and then, like that in the Kotovka Park of Minsk,3 which used to be newsworthy events for both the authorities and civil society, whereas in 2020, there were dozens and hundreds of such events across the country. The Flying University coordinated lectures for local communities with topics ranging from history and politics to economics and physics.4 The COTOS initiative was launched to form legitimate collegial bodies of territorial public self-government, which united neighborhood communities.5

While the official Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus (FTUB) was only busy collecting signatures against EU sanctions, sectoral proto trade unions emerged, such as White Coats (medics), ByPol (law enforcement officers), and medical and cultural solidarity funds. Fifteen university associations formed the National Student Council in the reshaped Union of Belarusian Students

Internal funding grows, as legal mechanisms are no longer available

Donations to CSOs showed snowballing growth in 2020. USD 500 raised from the sale of tickets to a lecture organized by a CSO was quite an accomplishment in 2019, while in 2020, hundreds of thousands and even millions were raised. For example, Honest People initiative raised EUR 185,000; ByCovid-19 – USD 335,000; BySOL – EUR 3.5 million.6

The authorities are doing everything possible to put a restraint upon CSOs’ financial activities for political reasons. Ulei and MolaMola crowdfunding platforms were shut down, which significantly narrowed small CSOs’ possibilities to quickly generate donated funds. In an effort to limit the flow of aid from solidarity funds, the government blocked the bank cards of recipients of such aid. Journalist Irina Zlobina and journalist and media manager Andrei Aleksandrov were detained and placed in a pre-trial detention facility, after their efforts to provide financial aid to victims of repression were defined as “financing of extremist activities.” In this environment, the use of cryptocurrencies, which are legal and exempted from taxes in Belarus, is the only safe way to transfer funds. BySOL Foundation is already providing financial assistance in bitcoins.

Alongside donations for the purchase of anti-COVID-19 protection gears, CSOs tried to lobby liberalization of legislation on the reception of foreign humanitarian aid. Decree No.3 on foreign gratuitous aid was issued in May 2020, but CSOs’ basic proposals were ignored, and human rights activists reported stricter requirements compared with the previous regulations.

Breakdown of the framework of communication with the state

Amid the political crisis, even the scarce opportunities for the CSO-state interaction have been evaporating. Public officers consider this interaction dangerous, even with the organizations they had been safely communicating with. CSOs consider this communication immoral: how can one address the Interior Ministry, seeking to combat domestic violence, thus being aware of numerous documented episodes of torture and ill-treatment by the police? This largely shackles any advocacy attempts.

Besides, the government fears any forms of grassroots activism, seeing (not without reason) the seeds of political discontent and popular mobilization in it. The authorities have equally ignored the 100,000 signatures in defense of the white-red-white flag7 and 52,000 ones against the request to ordain a law that would restrict “LGBT propaganda in relation to children and young people.”8

Brest activists strongly protested against the launch of a local battery plant that they consider hazardous. Lukashenko met with them during the election campaign and promised to hold a local referendum. However, the plant began operating after the election, and the referendum never took place.

Big conferences, which were used for dialogue between representatives of CSOs and the state, either were hot held in 2020 (Kastrychnitski Economic Forum) or were held online (Minsk Forum, Minsk Dialogue). Ranking officials (ministers, the presidential chief of staff and the president himself) had been no strangers to such events, while in 2020, government bodies were only represented by Oleg Makarov, Director of the presidential Belarusian Institute for Strategic Research think-tank (at the Minsk Dialogue Forum), and Viktor Shadursky, Dean of the International Relations Department at the Belarusian State University. By the way, Shadursky had to resign from the Belarusian State University in March 2021 after 12 years of service. Meanwhile, the Minsk Forum was attended by representatives of the alternative political forces Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Pavel Latushko, Tatiana Korotkevich and Andrei Dmitriev.

Conclusion

New local initiatives that unite residents of neighborhoods and districts in Telegram chat rooms will remain a permanent reality in Belarus. Although each particular initiative will develop in its own way, combined, they will bring along new CSO activists, give them first-hand experience of activism and motivate for further self-actualization. There will also be movement in the opposite direction: the case of the Flying University lecture center showed that ‘old expertise’ is in demand with new initiatives. Educational programs for community leaders will most likely expand.

Internal funding will not be able to maintain its impressive momentum in 2021. Emergencies that will require fundraising (the coronavirus pandemic, crackdown on street protests, etc.) will either disappear altogether or become not urgent, and will be perceived as the new normal. The debilitating economic recession and the overall decline in the standards of living in Belarus will also cause a reduction in donations.

CSO-state communication venues will recover slowly, since mutual mistrust and fears are greater than ever. International organizations, which previously used to call on state agencies and CSOs to engage in joint projects, will soon tend to avoid the involvement of the state in the projects because of substantial reputational risks.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing political crisis, any popular advocacy will be perceived by the state as a dangerous rise of uncontrolled grassroots activism, and, therefore, it will not be successful. Nevertheless, advocacy campaigns will continue as a de jure legal instrument of political mobilization.