Ice hockey world championship in Belarus: Lukashenka ignores protests

The pressure to withdraw the Ice Hockey World Championship from those in power is immense. But Aleksandr Lukashenka is not thinking of withdrawing from Belarus as part of the host. The world association wants to make a decision at the end of January.

Aleksandr Lukashenka has ruled out a withdrawal from Belarus as part of the host of the ice hockey world championship in May and June of this year: “There is no reason why it should not take place,” said the country’s president in an interview on Russian state television published on Sunday. Anything else would be a shame: “We are ready to host the World Cup tomorrow as well.”

In doing so, he was responding to demands from at home and abroad to the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) to withdraw the World Cup games from Belarus against the background of massive human rights violations by its regime. According to witnesses and human rights organizations, this includes torture of demonstrators. In an open letter to IIHF President René Fasel, the writer Sasha Filipenko described a brutal act by Lukashenka. After reading the article, members of the Bundestag from the government and the opposition reaffirmed their demand that Lukashenka’s regime should not be given an opportunity for “whitewashing”.

The Belarusian opposition party Svetlana Tichanovskaya also referred to the wishes of the participants in the World Cup: “Most countries do not want to take part in Lukashenka’s political show,” she wrote on Telegram. With 160 political prisoners and thousands in prison, there should be no sporting event in Belarus. Tichanovskaya ran against Lukashenka in the presidential election in August. Lukashenka had been declared the winner after an alleged vote quota of 80.1 percent. The choice is widely considered to be fake.

The EU no longer recognizes Lukashenka as president. In the meantime, the coordinator of the “Embassy of the People of Belarus” appealed to the Germans to support and show solidarity: “To plead for the World Cup to be held in Belarus under such circumstances means (…) that one faces the obvious suffering the people shut up and approve of the terrorism against the civilian population of the Republic of Belarus. ”The IIHF wants to make a decision at the end of January.