Belarusian Human Rights House hosted an open discussion “Lithuania and Belarus: politics of normalization” organized by Belarusians from the European Humanities University (EHU) and Lithuanians from Initiatives for Women of New Generation.
The discussion took place within the framework of an alternative creative festival, Ladyfest 2009.
According to the Belarusian scholars, much higher demands are put on women in the Belarusian society.
Still, women can feel equal to men in terms of repression rigidity. The so-called “weak gender” members cannot feel safe if they join the camp of the regime opponents: they get beaten up as severely as men, the EHU investigators pointed out.
They added that female oppositionists in Belarus report sexual or humiliating undertone in actions against them much more often than men. Luckily, no explicit rapes by policemen or other official have ever been reported.
A sociology lecturer at the EHU Center for Gender Studies who wished to remain unnamed, noted in her presentation that a perception of man and woman in Belarus is pre-determined by the nature of the political regime in the country.
The Belarusian president Aliaksandr Lukashenka has been thoroughly creating his image as a “father of the nation”, thus excluding any female image out of the political sphere.
Recently this policy has reached its zenith. The de facto divorced President who never appears with any woman in public mentioned he has a small son. A 5 year old boy Kolia was exposed to media when following his father to official events, military parade, even official foreign trips – regardless of all protocol requirements.
“It is a case of things that could seem impossible in the past getting gradually normalized. Rather than a demonstration of being a good father it is an example that this person can do anything he wants to, no matter how odd it looks to others. In this situation nobody cares how the boy actually feels, leave alone his mother who is in fact deprived of her child. Any woman who could try practicing anything like this in office – living with different partners, delivering a child out of wedlock and exposing it at any case, would be considered… Well, it is impossible to imagine anything like this in Belarus,” – argued the participants of the discussion in HRH in Vilnius.
Mr Lukashenka has already declared Kolia his successor. It is in odds with the acting Constitution and basic democratic principles, but explains the way he is educating the boy.
“In the Belarusian case the absence of a woman beside the president is not only the sign of the gender inequality, but a means of how the state power is imagined. Lukashenka as a leader of the nation does not need any woman because the whole nation is supposed to be that woman. <…> this imaginary of presidential power as omnipotent and inherited from the father to the son does not need any female representation,” – concluded the speaker at the round table.
HRH Vilnius representatives believe that the way the reactionary gender relations are being “normalized” by official Belarusian media coverage is something that must be considered by the human rights defenders.
“Normalization is when everyone is playing to the same tune, when any alternative view is suppressed. Today’s gathering concerns the freedom of expression, a very important aspect in activities of our organization,” explains Anna Gerasimova, a Belarusian HRH director.
