A YEAR or so ago, in the warm, yellow sunshine of late summer, some bagpipers led a protest through the streets of Minsk.

There was a woman, her long hair in dreadlocks, and two bearded men, and they were blasting out a folksy cover of what had become the anthem of Belarusian democracy.

“Change!”, sang-yelled the crowds to the tune, “Our hearts demand change.”

The song is by 1980s Korean-Russian rock heartthrob Viktor Tsoi. It was a sort of soundtrack for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But the musicians playing traditional bagpipes – or dudas – had turned the old hit in to something deeply and powerfully Belarusian. They had made Tsoi’s Change their own.

It was really moving.

This was the skirl of freedom and of hope. Crowds, roused by the music, waved the red and white flag of democratic Belarus and demanded the ousting of the man long dubbed as the “last dictator of Europe” and the official winner of an August 2020 presidential poll.

This weekend will mark exactly a year since Alyaksandr Lukashenka – whose name is sometimes also transliterated in a Russian style as Alexander Lukashenko – effectively stole elections in Belarus, retaining power against the wishes of his people.

The 12 months since have brought a catalogue of horrors: mass incarcerations, credible and repeated accounts of torture and even the grounding of an international Ryanair flight to abduct an opposition journalist on board.

The Lukashenka regime has slowly but surely re-imposed itself on Belarus. The mass protests – with their red and white banners and folk rock – are now gone. On state TV opposition leaders – many of them women – are denounced as traitors against a backdrop of a hangman’s noose.

This week alone there has been a catalogue of stomach-churning stories.

A young activist, Vital Shishou, who helped dissidents flee to neighbouring Ukraine, was found hanging, dead, in a Kiev park. Friends suspect foul play.

A young sprinter, Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, was forced to seek asylum in Poland after criticising sports officials at the Tokyo Olympics.

And two leading organisers of the anti-Lukashenka marches, Maria Kalesnikova and Maksim Znak, went on trial.

These big news items make headlines abroad. Most of us will have flicked or scrolled past them in our newspapers, with a sigh and a sense of powerlessness.

But it is the smaller stories, the ones we don’t usually hear about, which help spell out what is really happening in Belarus, the sheer depth of the state oppression now being brought down on its people.

One of these caught my eye this week. A dry wire report from the state telegraph agency, Belta: the protesting bagpipers, it reported, had been arrested.

It is really hard to convey the cold, hard officialese of Belarusian law enforcement in English.

But Belta carried a chilling, absurd quote from the Interior Ministry explaining why 16 musicians had been arrested. “In August 2020 a group of bagpipers repeatedly headed a column of protestors,” an unnamed official said. “They used their musical instruments to attract a mass procession of citizens. The performance strengthened the mood of protest among participants and pushed them to carry out illegal acts in respect of police officers.”

In other words, their crime was playing the pipes and drums too rousingly.

The Interior Ministry published a video of the musicians being arrested by armed men.

Independent but unconfirmed reports said those seized included members of fantasy folk group called Irdorath and that they were picked up while celebrating the birthday of the band’s frontwoman, Nadzeya Kalach.

It is horrible and it is terrifying. But there is also something tragicomic about Lukashenka and his regime, about the fact they see pipers and drummers as a threat.

Tyrants can be as ridiculous as they are cruel and that is certainly true of Belarus’s gauche, clumsy, gaffe-prone leader. Brutes do not have to be clever.

But they do have to have money. And that is where Britain comes in: Lukashenka is at least partially bankrolled here. Does that mean the UK could have more influence than we think over the dictator?

This week the woman who most observers believe really won those elections last year was in London. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya – or Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Russian transliteration – met Boris Johnson.

She got warm words. “We are very much on your side, very much in support of what you are doing,” the prime minister told her. “We are committed to supporting human rights and civil society in Belarus.”

Later Tsikhanouskaya, a now exiled former English teacher whose husband Siarhei, an opposition blogger, remains in a Belarusian prison, said she feared she could simply disappear. “No one in Belarus can feel safe,” she told the BBC.

The UK, the US and the EU have imposed sanctions on Lukashenka and regime figures. Tsikhanouskaya wants tougher action.

Yet as recently as June 2020 big Western finance houses were buying Belarusian debt. This was before the recent repressions – but not before investors knew what kind of state Belarus was.

Lukashenka – even after Siarhei Tsikhanousky, for example, was locked up – was able to raise $1.25m in bonds in an offering on the London Stock Exchange.

Major investment firms, such as Scottish-based Abrdn, or HSBC, Franklin Templeton, Payden & Rygel, Amundi, BlackRock and PIMC, lent Lukashenka’s Belarus money, according to investigative journalism project openDemocracy.

There was nothing illegal about what City investors did. Indeed, lending to states is good, safe and relatively uncontroversial business: governments very rarely default.

Tom Rowley, post-Soviet space editor at openDemocracy, said the debt might mean the UK has cards to play against Lukashenka.

“No one, it seems, knows how Belarus has spent this money, and the Belarusian opposition is concerned that the funds could have been used to support the regime crackdown,” he said of the bond issue.

“At the very least, MPs should be asking questions about what leverage this debt gives the UK – and what positive role the financiers who either hold or have underwritten the bonds can play in this terrible situation. Most of them, after all, position themselves as 'ethical investors'."

Could it be that, in Belarus, he who pays the piper might get to call the tune?

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