Belarus Is a Warning

I’m going to tell you how the people in charge of my country made the truth a crime.

Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s longtime president, has spent about three decades destroying our country’s fragile democratic institutions: elections, the judiciary, political opposition and independent media. Many critics have been imprisoned; others, fearful, have left the country or stayed but kept quiet; some have simply disappeared. In January, Mr. Lukashenko secured his seventh term in elections widely seen as a sham.

It didn’t have to be this way. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., there was a window in which my country could have democratized and moved closer to Europe and the West. Instead, the pro-Russia Mr. Lukashenko came to power in 1994 promising to drain the swamp. He never left.

In hindsight, 2020 was a turning point. The regime sensed the danger of the moment and the ensuing crackdown was violent and swift. Tens of thousands of people were arrested, a local human rights group estimates that there are more than 1,000 political prisoners, and, according to U.N. estimates, more than 300,000 people have left the country in the time since.