Belarus seeks to copy neighboring Russia’s repressive LGBTQ+ policies, activists say

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — As police raided the home of a gay couple in the Belarusian capital of Minsk and brutally beat them, the officers didn’t hide that the crackdown was aligned to similar moves in neighboring Russia.

The students, Andrei and Sasha, said security forces demanded that they unlock their smartphones and surrender the names of “gays in Minsk and Moscow.”

“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 like other gay and transgender Belarusians interviewed by The Associated Press insisted on being identified only by his first name because of safety concerns.

“They wanted to expose an ‘underground network’ of gay people in Belarus, following the example of Russia,” he said of the autumn raid. “They openly told us that if it is banned in Russia, then it should be banned in Belarus too.”

Belarus decriminalized homosexuality in 1994 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the deeply conservative country under authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, and there are no laws protecting LGBTQ+ rights.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin adopted repressive laws curtailing LGBTQ+ rights in recent years, and close ally Belarus is poised to follow suit, proposing legislation to ban “gay propaganda.” While still to be defined in Belarus, the Russian version bans any endorsement of LGBTQ+ activities and nontraditional sexual relations.

But even before the measure is drafted, life has gotten worse for the LGBTQ+ community in Belarus, rights advocates say.

They say 32 people were detained and beaten in seven cities in the last three months, including 10 transgender or nonbinary individuals and activists. Some were released after questioning, fined and allowed to emigrate, they say, while several remain in custody, facing charges of “disseminating pornography” and up to four years in prison.

More people probably have been detained but might be afraid to contact advocates, according to LGBTQ+ rights group TG House Belarus.

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 the group’s coordinator, Alisa Sarmant.

“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.

Moscow has close ties with Minsk, using Belarusian territory as a springboard for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last year, the Russian Supreme Court effectively outlawed LGBTQ+ activism, designating “the international LGBT movement” as an extremist group.

“We will also need to take similar measures,” said Natalya Kochanova, Lukashenko’s closest adviser and speaker of the upper chamber of parliament.

“We have family values, traditions we pass from generation to generation -– traditions of family, Orthodox Christianity,” she said, echoing the Kremlin line.

After Russia banned gender transitioning last year, transgender individuals in Belarus began having problems, even though the procedures are not forbidden. According to Sarmant, the government this year rejected over 80% of those seeking official authorization for gender-affirming procedures and changing their gender marker in official documents. By comparison, 10%-15% were rejected in 2020, she said.

Among other issues, she lists “catastrophic shortages” of hormonal treatments, humiliating medical procedures and prosecutions on political grounds.

LGBTQ+ activists participated in mass protests that engulfed Belarus in 2020 after Lukashenko won a sixth term in an election the opposition and the West criticized as rigged. Authorities responded with a brutal crackdown, arresting about 65,000 people over the next four years.

There are about 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski. Many imprisoned opposition leaders and activists have spent more than a year in complete isolation, without medical assistance.

As the crackdown widens, LGBTQ+ people are leaving Belarus, seeking asylum abroad.

Tania, a 39-year-old transgender woman, told AP she was arrested twice for following opposition sites that were outlawed as extremist and for supporting Ukraine, adding that she was beaten and subjected to electric shocks in custody. She eventually fled the country.

During the final raid of her apartment, security forces broke her tooth and two ribs, jailed her for 12 days and ordered her to repent on camera, she said.

“Abuse behind bars continued day and night,” she said. “I was humiliated. They tried to shove the taser into my rectum or put it against my genitals. ... In a country where terror reigns, you either agree with the government’s line, or have little chance of surviving without access to hormonal treatment.”

Marat, a 37-year-old transgender man, told AP that authorities demanded last year that he detransition and change his documents to restore the gender marker he was assigned at birth. By that time, he said he had “pumped-up muscles and had grown a beard.”

“I couldn’t believe that the doctors are demanding to bring everything back to the way it was and this absurdity is happening in the 21st century,” he said, adding that he tried to contest it but eventually fled to France with his four children.

Lukashenko, who has run Belarus with an iron first for three decades, has publicly mocked homosexuals. After Germany’s openly gay foreign minister in 2012 called him “the last dictator in Europe,” Lukashenko replied, “Better to be a dictator than gay.”

All independent LGBTQ+ groups have been shut down in Belarus, security forces regularly raid Minsk nightclubs where underground parties are held, and advocates say the KGB blackmails members of the community into cooperating.

“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,” said Pavel Sapelka of the Viasna Center, the country’s most prominent rights group.

In April, the Culture Ministry expanded its definition of pornography to include “nontraditional relations,” meaning anyone possessing such material can face criminal prosecution and up to four years in prison.

“Belarus must abolish these outrageous amendments and stop the cynical persecution of LGBTQ+ people,” said Anastasiia Kruope, assistant researcher for Europe and Central Asia with Human Rights Watch.

Rights advocates say LGBTQ+ people in Belarus continue to face stigmatization in society, noting a high suicide rate in the community.

“The state’s policy has a particularly strong impact on young LGBT+ people, who have been living for four years in the conditions of an artificially created ‘sterile’ space, a Russian agenda and the constant broadcast of hate speech,” according to a report last month by the rights group Justice Initiative.

The legislation being prepared ahead of next month’s presidential election seeks to punish anyone promoting “nontraditional sexual relations, gender change (or) pedophilia.”

TG House Belarus began a petition drive against the legislation, collecting 33,000 signatures. Sarmant suggests the recent raids were “revenge for this campaign in order for everyone to hide, get scared, and — best of all -– keep silent.”

Andrei and Sasha, whose home was raided, said if the bill becomes law, they would leave Minsk rather than “wait for a prison term.”