This fall, security forces in Belarus — the former Soviet republic and staging ground for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — raided the home of a gay couple in the Belarusian capital of Minsk and brutally beat them, according to reporting by the Associated Press.
The university students said the officers were transparent that the assault was inspired by similar treatment of the LGBTQ+ community in Russia.
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“They slammed our heads against the door frame, threatened to report us to the university, and said that this was just the beginning,” said Andrei, 20, who asked to be identified only by his first name.
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Security forces demanded that Andrei and his partner Sasha unlock their smartphones and reveal the names of “gays in Minsk and Moscow.”
“They wanted to expose an ‘underground network’ of gay people in Belarus, following the example of Russia,” Andrei said of the raid. “They openly told us that if it is banned in Russia, then it should be banned in Belarus, too.”
The state-sanctioned attack comes as the country’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, pushes copycat legislation outlawing “LGBTQ+ propaganda” based on similar laws passed in Russia at Putin’s urging.
Like the Russian version of the law, the bill in Belarus will likely bar any endorsement of LGBTQ+ activities and “nontraditional” sexual relations.
Andrei and Sasha said if the bill becomes law, they’ll leave Minsk rather than “wait for a prison term.”
While Belarus decriminalized homosexuality in 1994 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the deeply conservative country is in the throes of a violent backlash against the LGBTQ+ community at Putin’s urging, rights activists say.
Lukashenko “uses repressions against the LGBTQ+ community in order to gain some kind of praise from Russian authorities and shore up support among conservative residents of Belarus,” said Alisa Sarmant, coordinator for LGBTQ+ rights group TG House Belarus.
“To a large extent, it’s a carbon copy of what is happening in Russia, but in Belarus, all these discriminatory practices take on uglier and harsher forms,” Sarmant said.
At least 32 people have been detained and beaten in seven Belarusian cities in the last three months, according to rights organizations, including 10 transgender or nonbinary individuals and activists. Several remain in custody facing charges of “disseminating pornography,” punishable by up to four years in prison. Others were forced to emigrate.
The Belarusian dictator and his allies have made their enmity for the LGBTQ+ community clear in both words and deeds.
“We will also need to take similar measures,” said Natalya Kochanova, Lukashenko’s closest adviser and speaker of the upper chamber of parliament, speaking of Russia’s repressive laws.
“We have family values, traditions we pass from generation to generation — traditions of family, Orthodox Christianity,” she said, parroting Putin’s line of attack on the LGBTQ+ community.
Lukashenko, after Germany’s openly gay foreign minister called him “the last dictator in Europe” in 2012, replied, “Better to be a dictator than gay.”
“Intimidation, arrests, and blackmail have been used in Belarus for years to create a so-called ‘LGBTQ+ database’ and declare an entire social group dangerous,” according to Pavel Sapelka of the Viasna Center, a prominent rights group in the country.
In April, the Culture Ministry expanded its definition of pornography to include “nontraditional relations”; anyone possessing it faces criminal prosecution and a four-year prison term.
The balloting will be “a sham,” said exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya of the upcoming election.
LGBTQ+ activist Sarmant says the effect of Belarus’ crackdown has been felt acutely by transgender people, who face “catastrophic shortages” of hormonal treatments, humiliating medical procedures, and prosecutions on political grounds.
In the last year, the government rejected over 80% of applications for trans people seeking official authorization for prescriptive and surgical healthcare or a change to their gender marker in official documents. Remarkably, both are still legal in Belarus. In 2022, 10% to 15% of applications were rejected.
Belarus is one of the most repressive regimes in the world, with about 1,300 political dissidents in prison. Lukashenko redoubled his efforts to quash dissent following his reelection in 2020, in what rights groups called a stolen victory. Over 65,000 Belarusians have been arrested based on their political activity over the last four years.
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