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Le Monde
Le Monde
31 Aug 2024


Images Le Monde.fr

Behind her round glasses, Veronika Lidorenko's blue eyes came alive when the 30-something spoke about the tech world in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in 2020: "It was a world apart, especially in Belarus. After yoga and morning coffee, we sometimes took cabs to work!" Today, this employee of a Warsaw-based start-up and founder of U Hub, a platform for Belarusian start-ups in Poland, is also an asylum seeker. Lidorenko fled via Ukraine to Poland in September 2020, when Poland had just inaugurated Poland.Business Harbour, a program for Belarusian entrepreneurs and IT specialists forced to leave their country after the uprising of summer 2020.

Like millions of Belarusians four years ago, Lidorenko was enthusiastic about the 2020 election campaign, hoping to put an end to President Alexander Lukashenko's 26 years in power. Today, she has no illusions about a swift political transition. In August 2020, the authoritarian leader refused to admit defeat, as evidenced by the million ballot papers sent in by the Golos application, developed by Pavel Liber, a Belarusian computer scientist, to prevent electoral fraud. Law enforcement quickly silenced the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. The repression has continued ever since, forcing NGOs and the media to operate outside the country.

In 2020, some of them, like Lidorenko, in the IT and new technologies sectors, went to prison. According to the Belarusian human rights association Viasna ("spring" in Belarusian), some 1,400 political prisoners are still in government jails. A simple like on social media can now be a sufficient pretext for a stay behind bars. In July, Elizaveta Makridina, who worked in the IT sector in Poland, was detained for her involvement in the protests of 2020, as soon as she crossed the Polish-Belarusian border.

After long remaining a mystery to Lukashenko, a former collective farm manager, tech was for a time indulged by the Belarusian authorities, but eventually, the sector was not spared by the leaden weight. "I fed them all with my left breast... And they started making a media fuss," he said a few days before the election.

In early September 2020, PandaDoc, a virtual contract management platform, began offering paid training courses to resigning police officers. Four of its members were sentenced to prison terms, which were later shortened. A few months later, Imaguru, the largest Belarusian start-up incubator, was closed down by the regime. Its directors had to flee to Poland.

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