belarusians.co.uk | Беларусы ў Вялікабрытаніі

Recently, the Guardian published two articles about Belarus:

Belarus and Georgia get together for a few potshots at Russia
Alexander Lukashenko, the hardline president of Belarus, and Mikhail Saakashvili, the leader of Georgia, have forged an unlikely political alliance in a “media war” with the Kremlin.

The fine art of making a drama out of a crisis
I went to Index on Censorship out of sense of duty, yet the company’s performance isn’t worthy but an inventive combination. Depictions of misery are leavened with flashes of Auden’s “ironic points of light”. Numbers, which you can see on the Index website, has the actors miming surreal routines while a cameraman projects on to the wall the statistics that enumerate Belarus’s plight: the scale of the sex trade in young women; the botched abortions which leave women sterile; the poverty of a country where the average wage is $350 a month; and the oppression of a state which murders its political opponents and has the fourth highest prison population per capita in the world. Then, to illustrate how Belarussians are desperate to emigrate, the projector flashed up the story of how, in October 2006, 240 cows trampled down an electric fence and swam the River Bug to sanctuary in Poland, the first case of mass flight to freedom by livestock in the EU’s history, as the company delightedly points out.