Thousands of protesters in Belarus swarmed the streets of the capital to demand the resignation of the country’s longtime president for the 14th straight Sunday.
According to the Visana human rights center , 20,000 people took part in the rally.
The large crowd of people gathered in the eastern part of Minsk headed toward Kurapaty, a wooded area on the City’s outskirts where over 200,000 people were executed by Soviet Secret police during Stalinist era purges.
The demonstrators carrying banners with different inscriptions as “The People’s memory lasts longer than a life of a dictatorship”, “stop torturing your people” encountered police using stun grenades to break up the crowds and fired warning shots in the air with what the authorities called non lethal weapons.
It will be recalled that the protests began after President Alexander Lukashenko won his sixth term in the August 9 election, which the people alleged was widely rigged.
According to reports, his win over Svitlana Tsikhanouskaya, has set off the largest and the most sustained wave of mass protests of his 26 years in power.
The 66 year old, has relentlessly suppressed opposition and independent media in Belarus but struggled to quell the recent unrests in the country .
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