Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: We reprint this article from the portal Masina where it was originally published on the 18th of January. Online workers held a protest on Saturday in front of the National Assembly of Serbia. The authorities accepted invitation to negotiations, stated Miran Pogačar, president of the Association of Internet Workers (URI). Members […]
Although the shooting of an unarmed citizen can be considered an isolated event, there has been an increasing escalation of violence by the police in recent years. We, as activists of Organizata Politike, have witnessed it while protesting alongside chromium miners, oil refinery workers, and students. A very violent intervention by the police took place last year against the artists who were defending the National Theatre against demolition.
This wave of repression also relates to a decision by the Ministry of Interior to send into early retirement more than 1,000 policemen from the older generation, replacing them over three years with younger newcomers in better physical condition but lacking any experience in handling complex situations. Such was the case of the policeman who killed Klodian; a man in his early twenties who had joined the force only recently, and who had been immediately transferred to one of the most infamous police units: “The Eagles.”
We share here notes by LeftEast contributing editor Volodymyr Ishchenko on Belarus from August 10th (Part 1) and 19th (Part 2), 2020. Part 1: SOME QUICK COMPARATIVE NOTES ON BELARUS (August 10, 2020) 1. Both Lukashenka and Tsikhanouskaia claim ~80% voters. The official results look suspicious as they are improbably stable. Lukashenka gets ~80% of […]
Although Belarus is often referred to as a repressive state, the familiar ‘Parisian arsenal’ of tear gas canisters, water cannons, rubber bullets, and stun grenades was used here on a mass scale for the first time. Western technologies of violence were complemented by traditional post-Soviet police brutality: beating and detention of random people, torture, humiliation, and sometimes threats of rape in jail, the hunting down of journalists, etc.
None of the opposition leaders joined the crowd or made radical statements. The opposition movement turned out to be on the whole amorphous, without clear leadership at the top and any leaders from below. At the same time, the ruling elite showed no signs of a split, the security apparatus and the bureaucracy generally remained loyal, although there have been signs of hesitation at the lower and regional levels (with several state media journalists and police officers resigning).
Note from LeftEast editors: This article originally appeared in Dversia on 07.10.2020. “Tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons against bare-handed youth! Dad, this is for you who died and there was no respirator! (..) This is for you and for my newborn son! There were no respirators in the Zemun hospital while they (the National […]
Engels once said that the way a capitalist city is organized tends to hide production’s ugliest and most dangerous surplus: poverty. And where it cannot be hidden, it has to be attacked. Could this help explain why the state often seems to be at its most violent when the smallest sums are at stake? In […]
This article was originally published on the website Balkan Stories. I know some people will certainly misunderstand the text below, but as someone who campaigned on the issue, who received numerous anonymous threats while working at the University in Sarajevo for „spreading gayness and being an atheist“, I am offering an analyses and my opinion […]
We are publishing this article in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian web portal Bilten. In the “Offenders in Gabrovo!” Facebook group, natives of the eponymous Central Bulgarian town comment upon all sorts of irregularities: they lambaste the owner of a car parked on the wrong side of the street, mobilize to replace a broken lamp post, […]
Note from LeftEast editors: The article was originally published on dversia.net in Bulgarian on the 25.02.2019 On January 30 there were dangerously high levels of air pollution in the capital reported, three times higher than the norm. In its latest air quality report, the European Court of Auditors points out that Bulgaria is at the […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: The Central European University – a private University in Budapest founded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation – has attracted the attention of the world media with its strife against the Victor Orban government in Hungary. A struggle over its right to remain in the country ensued in early 2017 […]