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Alex Rühle
Ever heard of Roman Bondarenko? The artist and designer went to the back yard of his house in Minsk on November 11th last year and messed with the masked men in civilian clothes who tore off the red, white and red ribbons that symbolize the protest against Alexander Lukashenko . The men beat Bondarenko to death. His last sentence in the Telegram chat – “I’m going out” – then became the slogan of the demonstrators in Belarus, he himself became the “accidental figurehead”, as Natalia Pankova calls him in a poem that is printed in the harrowing anthology “Voices of the Hope “, which appears on Monday, the anniversary of the great electoral fraud: On August 9, Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected in the presidential election with 80.1 percent of the vote after more than 25 years in power. That same evening people took to the streets and Lukashenko let his Omon troops off the chain, special units in black uniforms that have been beating the whole country since then.