Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC filmed the beatings as protesters were arrested

Police in Belarus have arrested hundreds of people during protests against a so-called "social parasites" tax on the under-employed.

Thousands defied a ban to protest, taking to the streets of Minsk and other cities. Demonstrators shouted "Fascists!" at riot police.

There have been weeks of sporadic protests against a $230 (£185) levy on those unemployed for six months.

President Alexander Lukashenko insists the tax will not be scrapped.

He says it instils discipline in the workshy, though he has suspended it for this year.

Opponents say it punishes those who cannot find a job.

Image copyright AP Image caption President Lukashenko has run Belarus since 1994

'Beating the participants'

Organisers called the protest Freedom Day, evoking the independent Belarus that lasted just six months after the First World War, in 1918.

The march in the capital Minsk took place on the 99th anniversary of the proclamation of the Belarusian People's Republic.

Demonstrators tried to march down one of the major streets in Minsk, but were blocked by police who began arresting them, along with journalists covering the protest.

Image copyright EPA

"They're beating the participants, dragging women by the hair to buses. I was able to run to a nearby courtyard," demonstrator Alexander Ponomarev told AP news agency.

Earlier, police raided the offices of human rights group Vesna and detained about 30 activists. The authorities had already jailed more than 100 opposition supporters for terms of between three and 15 days in the lead-up to the demonstration, reports said.

At the scene, by Sergey Kozlovsky, BBC Russian Service, Minsk

It seemed like the whole city was in a state of emergency - police everywhere, a lot of police trucks, water cannons, cars with equipment for storming barricades.

We heard that people who were unable to get to the first meeting place, the Science Academy metro station, gathered in another place - Yakub Kolas square. There we saw a crowd with white-red-white flags, which are a symbol of opposition in Belarus. The crowd was around 1,000-1,500 strong.

We started filming there. People shouted "long live Belarus". Very soon riot police appeared. In a couple of minutes police blocked the whole street from both sides. Protesters were surrounded.

Several police trucks were sent in and arrests started. Riot police started to detain literally everyone, even some journalists and old people were detained. Those who were trying to resist were beaten.

Earlier this month Mr Lukashenko said people who worked fewer than 183 days a year would not have to pay the tax this year and said those who had already paid it last year would be compensated if they found a job.

According to a recent tax inspection, 470,000 people should have paid the tax but only 50,000 had done so, Reuters news agency said.

Image copyright EPA Image caption Protesters and journalists covering the demonstration in Minsk were arrested

Image copyright AP Image caption Police were out in force on the streets of Minsk

Image copyright Reuters Image caption This was one of the largest protests in Belarus for several years

Mr Lukashenko has run Belarus - a country where little dissent is tolerated - since 1994.

He has been described by some Western officials as "Europe's last dictator".

However, Mr Lukashenko has recently been seeking to improve ties with the West and lessen the country's dependence on Russia.</s>MINSK -- Early on March 10, Vital Rymasheuski had a spring in his step.

Strongman President Alyaksandr Lukashenka had announced a rare concession the previous night in an effort to thwart a snowballing protest movement: He would suspend for a year the "social parasite" tax on unemployed Belarusians that had sparked rare street protests all around the country.

"It shows Lukashenka is weak," Rymasheuski said as he accelerated his Toyota RAV4 through a changing light on Independence Street and past the ominous, yellow neoclassical building in the capital that houses Belarus's security service, the KGB.

Rymasheuski, head of the opposition Christian Democrats, was excited about a protest he would join that evening in Maladzechna, a town of about 100,000 people an hour's drive northwest of Minsk. The protesters appeared to be gaining momentum, the notoriously harsh KGB hadn't stepped in to quash their demonstrations, and Lukashenka appeared to be wavering over a response. Should he let the rallies continue and chance what he would later characterize as "the Ukrainian scenario" -- in a reference to the protests that ousted a president in Kyiv four years ago -- or crack down and risk a Russian military intervention a la eastern Ukraine under the guise of protecting Moscow's strategic interests?

In Maladzechna, Rymasheuski got an answer. After marching with 1,000 other demonstrators, Rymasheuski was chased down by the KGB and detained along with two other opposition politicians. A local court quickly sentenced them to 15 days' administrative detention.

There were more detentions at a protest in Minsk five days later that was attended by around 3,000 people.

In all, more than 300 people have been taken into custody, jailed, or fined for protest actions since March 10, and Lukashenka has hinted that security forces will soon forcefully employ their usual tactic of cracking heads.

"We don't shut anyone's mouth, but one step to the left or to the right away from the law will be stopped in the most severe way possible," Lukashenka said at a meeting with security officials on March 23. "We're not scaring anyone, and we won't. But we'll be very tough in ensuring the country's laws and constitution are observed."

This is the time, throughout Lukashenka's 22-year tenure of scant tolerance for public dissent, when protests might start to fizzle out. Instead, they are continuing, with the next real test coming in the form of a rally in Minsk on March 25.

Indeed, something extraordinary is happening in Belarus, a country of almost 10 million people that has largely remained frozen in its Soviet past. Driven not by Belarus's traditional political opposition but by popular anger, Belarusians have flocked to squares around the country by the thousands and, under threat of detention, demanded not only the abolition of the joblessness tax on "social parasites" but also a solution to a deepening socioeconomic crisis and -- for good measure -- Lukashenka's resignation.

"It's time for Belarusians to get off their knees," Tatsyana Skolokina, a retiree in Maladzechna who said her meager pension is subsidized by family members' wages, which have been slashed due to recession, told RFE/RL.

She came to the protest with Inna Hanetskaya, a trained nurse who lost her job four months ago and worries that at some point down the road she will get a letter in the mail demanding she pay the "parasite" tax. The two have never been politically active before, Hanetskaya said, but "we are tired of fear."

"We have nothing left to lose," she said, adding that the KGB "can't jail all of us."

Such bold statements and movements are virtually unheard of since Lukashenka came to power in 1994. But frustrated by the joblessness tax and a two-year recession that many of them blame on the president, Belarusians have grown tired of waning living standards.

"Feel this. It is the feeling of hopelessness," Uladzimer Lazarev, a local historian who joined hundreds more protesters on Victory Square in Babruysk on March 12, told RFE/RL.

Babruysk, home to machine-building and metal-working industries as well as Belarus's largest timber mill, was crowded with laborers who had lost their jobs or seen their wages cut -- or hadn't been paid in months. "We are waking up!" and "Down with Lukashenka!" they chanted.

"Belarusians are modest people who have been more than happy to live modestly for 25 years," Lazarev said. "But today their modest salaries aren't enough for them even to enjoy the modest things in life: bread, potatoes, salo" -- a salt-cured pork fat -- "and 100 grams of vodka. Our wages aren't enough to support even this anymore."

Back in Minsk, Ivan, a historian who asked that only his first name be used because he is employed by a state university, told RFE/RL that it is rare to see such public dissent in Belarus. But today, he said, as he strolled through Independence Square, the site of protests in December 2010 that erupted after a flawed vote to reelect Lukashenka but were met with truncheons and mass arrests, "we are seeing the politicization of Belarusian society."

Since then, Belarus's political opposition has trodden lightly when it comes to political actions, fearful of a similarly brutal crackdown. Mikalay Statkevich, a presidential challenger who was imprisoned for nearly five years after the 2010 election, told RFE/RL that when he was released, "I found the opposition demoralized and unready to lead protests."

He is an organizer of the March 25 protest. But older and weakened from his time behind bars, he appears to be taking a more cautious approach. So far, that appears to be paying off.

As Rymasheuski, who was also a losing candidate in the 2010 poll, explained it, the opposition leadership is taking cues from the streets this time, and not the other way around.

"[The protests] have emerged organically and sporadically, and by people who have never been a part of the opposition," he said.

That seems to be because, after years of tolerating Lukashenka's authoritarian tendencies in exchange for stability, Belarusians "feel that Lukashenka has broken the social contract with them," Ivan said.

In a nutshell, that contract was the promise of economic stability and security in exchange for their staying out of politics. But mired in a recession that saw Belarus's economy shrink and employment decline last year, Ivan and political analysts said, Lukashenka can no longer uphold his end of the deal.

One of the biggest factors in the disintegration of the social contract has been Minsk's deteriorating relationship with Moscow, Yaraslau Romanchuk, a Belarusian libertarian economist and critic of Lukashenka who heads the Minsk-based Scientific Research Mizes Center, told RFE/RL.

Russia has for years subsidized up to around one-fifth of Belarus's economy, mainly by providing it with cheap oil and gas. But that model has started to crumble, as Russia struggles to dig itself out of a recession caused in part by low oil prices and Western sanctions over Moscow's military interventions in Ukraine and Syria. Meanwhile, Lukashenka has courted improved relations with the West, including through a visa-free regime that currently allows tourists from 80 different countries, including EU members and the United States, to visit Belarus without a visa for up to five days.

Yury Tsarik, head of the Russia studies program at the Center for Strategic and Foreign Policy Studies in Minsk, cited state statistics in arguing that Russia's flagging economy has rippled through Belarus in the form of 7 to 8 percent annual declines in GDP since 2014.

"Since late 2014, we haven't seen any positive trends in the economy, and certainly these negative trends hurt poorer people more than richer people," he said.

Then came the "social parasite" tax on jobless Belarusians in mid-February. It amounts to around $245, a hefty sum in a country with an average monthly wage of around $380.

"People feel like they are being sucked into a black hole," said Lazarev, the historian in Babruysk.

The size and speed at which the protests spread appear to have emboldened Belarusians. But that doesn't necessarily mean the country is primed for a Ukraine-style mass public uprising, as some observers have suggested.

Romanchuk warned against drawing direct comparisons between what is happening in Belarus and the unrest in Ukraine that ousted a Moscow-friendly president in 2014.

The Ukraine uprising began with protests over then-President Viktor Yanukovych's decision to spurn an Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013 that would have set the country on a westward path. It transformed into the popular antigovernment movement known as Euromaidan after security forces attacked peaceful demonstrators. The uprising culminated in February 2014, after more than 100 people had been killed and Yanukovych fled to Russia. Russia, which said it saw the West's hand in Euromaidan, moved quickly and covertly to invade eastern Ukraine and annex Crimea to secure what it saw as its sphere of influence and contribute to what many say is a new Cold War.

But the Belarusian demonstrations are unlike Ukraine protests, Romanchuk explained, because Belarusians aren't looking to join the European Union.

"They want to return to a situation where the government provides everything for them," he said. "If they were to get their $500 [salaries] back, most of them would tolerate Lukashenka for the rest of their lives."

Ivan, the historian, said people want "evolution in Belarus, not revolution."

"Belarusians are conservative and are wary of any revolution attempts," Balazs Jarabik, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who researches Eastern Europe, told RFE/RL in Minsk. "A majority would see it as an attempt to destroy the [independent] state."

Belarusians' caution, plus a growing fear among many people, including officials, that a genuine uprising against the government could provide a pretext for Russia to intervene militarily under the guise of protecting its strategic interests, might also work against the protests swelling further. Moscow has long hoped to build a military base in Babruysk, potentially cementing the country as a Russian satellite and buffer to NATO -- something Lukashenka has firmly resisted.

Minsk is already rife with rumors that Russia is meddling in the protests. "There are signs that the Russians are influencing both the protesters and the authorities," Tsarik said. Fueling concerns are joint Belarusian-Russian military exercises planned for September, when thousands of Russian troops will deploy across Belarus.

Belarus's powerful state-run television has been more than happy to push the specter of Russian intervention on prime-time news programs in an apparent effort to quell the protests in the name of independence.

But neither those nor the KGB's brutal tactics have succeeded in foiling protests.

That has Tsarik concerned that the situation could turn violent.

"There will be a scenario similar to that of December 2010, but on a more significant scale of fighting and destruction," he predicted. "The implementation of this scenario may lead to the beginning of a full-fledged internal conflict in the country."</s>Thousands of people in Belarus took to the streets on Saturday to oppose a “social parasites” tax on people who have been unemployed for six months. The tax promises to fine people about $230 if they have not worked in the past six months in order to push them to find a job. Critics say the levy punishes people who are already impoverished. Belarusian police arrested hundreds of people during the massive protest in the capital of Minsk, where demonstrators reportedly shouted "Fascists!" at authorities repeatedly over the course of the day.

Officers also blocked several hundred more protesters from entering a demonstration that had been forbidden by the government, according to the BBC. Reuters reported that several of the detained protesters had their signs confiscated and that some, including at least 10 journalists, had been beaten by police. “I’m afraid but for how long can I be afraid? Why should I be afraid of prison if I’m already in prison?” demonstrator Lubov Sankevich told the news agency.

 Another protester, Alexander Ponomarev, told ABC News that police were “beating the participants, dragging women by the hair to buses.” Video footage showed many of those detained were elderly protesters.

The protest Saturday marked the largest gathering in a series of demonstrations that had taken place over the past few weeks, the BBC reported. Two other protests occurred Saturday in the cities of Brest and Grodno, according to ABC News. No arrests were reported from either location. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that while he had suspended the tax for a year, he would not do away with it completely as he believed it encouraged discipline among the unemployed.</s>Popularly known as the "tax on social parasites" it slaps a levy of $250 on those who work less than 183 days per year. Those officially registered unemployed are exempt but must do community service for $10 per month.

The latest protests were in provincial towns. On Sunday, at least 600 people joined a rally in Babruysk, 1,000 in Orsha and hundreds in Brest and Rogachev. On Saturday hundreds protested in Pinsk and on Friday 1,000 took to the streets in Molodechno.

Protests of this scale are rare in the former Soviet republic, run since 1994 by President Alexander Lukashenko, who has described himself as the "last dictator in Europe".

Many protesters were middle-aged and elderly people who complained there was no work for them.

A protest in the capital Minsk last month drew around 2,000 people, the largest in the country for six years. On Thursday Lukashenko said the tax, introduced in 2015, would be suspended pending amendments.

Belarus has been in recession since 2015. The average monthly salary has fallen from an all-time high of $630 in mid-2014 to $380.

On Sunday, protesters in Babruysk and Orsha called for Lukashenko's resignation. Authorities did not use force against the protesters but more than a dozen activists were detained later.</s>Belarus has defended the mass arrests on Saturday during protests against a tax on those seen as under-employed.

Hundreds were arrested and some beaten up as thousands took to the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities.

The foreign ministry said the demonstrations were not peaceful as "petrol bombs and arms-laden cars" were found near the Minsk protest.

Police detained more people on Sunday in Minsk and elsewhere during further demonstrations.

Several dozen were detained in central Minsk, according to the news website Tut.by, as they expressed solidarity with those held on Saturday.

Human rights website Charter97 said there were more, small protests, in other cities.

Defending the government, foreign ministry spokesman Dzmitryy Mironchyk said the "actions of law enforcement agencies were completely appropriate" on Saturday.

He said the rallies had been unauthorised, which "bears specific consequence in any country of the world", and noted that no tear gas or water cannons were used.

Separately, the family of senior opposition figure, Mikalay Statkevich, have said they are concerned for his welfare because he has not been heard from since 24 March. An opposition website quoted the security services as denying knowledge of his whereabouts.

Mr Statkevich had been expected to lead Saturday's protests.

The authorities are reported to have jailed more than 100 opposition supporters for terms of between three and 15 days in the lead-up to Saturday's demonstration.

The weekend's events follow weeks of sporadic protests against a $230 (£185) levy on those unemployed for six months, dubbed a "social parasites" tax.

President Alexander Lukashenko insists the tax will not be scrapped and says it instils discipline in the workshy.

However, he has suspended it for this year. Opponents say it punishes those who cannot find a job.

Described by some in the West as "Europe's last dictator", Mr Lukashenko has ruled Belarus since 1994.

He tolerates little dissent, but has recently been trying to improve ties with the West and reduce the country's dependence on Russia.</s>Hundreds of Belarusians defied a protest ban to march against a so-called parasites tax on the long-term unemployed in the latest anti-government demonstration in an eastern European country.

Police yesterday began arresting protesters after blocking the march using a cordon of riot police wielding clubs and holding shields.

Belarus has seen a wave of protests over the past two months against President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled since 1994.

“They’re beating the participants, dragging women by the hair to buses. I was able to run to a nearby courtyard,” demonstrator Alexander Ponomarev said. The march took place on the 99th anniversary of the proclamation of the Belarusian People’s Republic, which lasted just six months when it was formed in 1918.

Earlier, police raided the office of the human rights group Vesna. About 30 of its activists were detained, the Belarusian Helsinki Committee said.

In the days leading up to the demonstration, more than 100 opposition supporters were sentenced to jail terms of three to 15 days, Vesna reported before the raid.

Prominent opposition figure Vladimir Neklayev was reportedly pulled off a train by police during the night as he tried to travel to Minsk.

In Romania last month hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets for days in protest at a bill decriminalising official misconduct.

Yesterday’s demonstrators in Belarus shouted “shame” and “basta [enough]” and deployed the opposition’s red and white flag, first used by the independent Belarusian People’s Republic in 1918 and again after independence from the Soviet Union.

In his 23 years as president, Lukashenko has stifled dissent and free media and retained much of the Soviet-style command economy.

The protests this year initially focused on his unpopular “anti-parasite” law that calls for a £185 tax on anyone who works less than six months a year, but does not register with the state labour exchange.

But the protests broadened into general dissatisfaction with his rule, which some critics have characterised as Europe’s last dictatorship.</s>Police detain scores attempting to hold banned rally, days after president warns of foreign-backed plot to topple him.

Authorities in Belarus have detained protesters as they attempted to hold a banned rally in the capital Minsk, amid rising public anger over falling living standards and an unpopular tax on the unemployed.

News agencies reported that scores of people, including 10 journalists, were taken away by riot police on Saturday, a day after authorities told organisers the event would be illegal.

Amnesty International said on its Russian-language Twitter account that dozens of people were grabbed off the street "indiscriminately". Some were beaten, according to reports.

The wide-scale detentions were also reported by Viasna, a human rights group, which also said that police had earlier raided its offices and briefly detained about 60 activists.

Opposition leader Vladimir Nekliayev, who was set to speak at the protest, was also stopped at the border on Saturday morning on his way to Minsk, his wife told the AFP news agency.

The planned demonstration was the latest in a wave of protests since February that pose the biggest challenge in years to President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the ex-Soviet state for a quarter of a century.

Earlier this week, Lukashenko accused a "fifth column" of plotting to overthrow him with the help of foreign-backed fighters. On Friday, he built on this theme, saying "someone wants to blow up the situation, and they use our scumbags".

Belarus has been in recession for the past two years, suffering the knock-on effects of an economic downturn in Russia and a sharp fall in oil prices. The hardship has brought thousands to the streets, including former Lukashenko supporters.

"I voted for him, but now I tell Lukashenko - leave," protester Lubov Sankevich told the Reuters news agency on Saturday.

"I'm afraid but how long we can be afraid? Why should I be afraid of prison if I'm already in prison?" Sankevich said.

A tax on those unemployed for six months, known as a law against "social parasites", was among the issues that first triggered the protests.

Lukashenko suspended the tax in light of the backlash, but the protests have continued.

Those against the tax say it is unfairly punishes people who are unable to find work.

Saturday's crackdown was the culmination of the Belarussian authorities hardening their position on the protests.

On Friday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) joined 48 rights organisations in calling for Lukashenko to end the "detention and harassment of protesters, journalists, human rights defenders, civil society activists and members of the country’s opposition party".

According to CPJ, at least 32 journalists have been detained or obstructed since the beginning of the month.

It is unclear as yet how the crackdown will affect relations with Belarus' neighbours.

Lukashenko has sought to improve ties with the West against the backdrop of cooling relations with Russia.

He has pardoned several political prisoners, spurring the European Union to lift sanctions against a country once described by the US as " Europe's last dictatorship".</s>In this photo taken on Wednesday, March 15, 2017, a protester holds overturned portrait of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko during a rally in Minsk, Belarus. An unusual new wave of anti-government protests in Belarus is being fueled by the country's unemployed, who traditionally have not challenged the authoritarian regime.

Start the conversation, or Read more at Connecticut Post.</s>Riot police in Belarus launched a massive crackdown Saturday on protesters trying to hold a banned march in Minsk. Hundreds were reported arrested, and a human rights leader said many of the detainees had been beaten by police and needed medical attention.

An estimated 700 people were trying to march through a central part of the capital, part of a wave of anti-government protests against a new tax on workers. Truckloads of police intercepted the protesters and attacked them with clubs.

Witnesses said unarmed civilians also were assaulted, and a Reuters reporter said at least 10 journalists were arrested.

Earlier Saturday, officials from the opposition group Vesna-96 said police had raided their headquarters in the capital and detained about 60 activists. All were later released, and there was no official comment on the incident.

Earlier this week, Belarus' authoritarian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, said dozens of militants planning an "armed provocation" had been arrested in Minsk and elsewhere in the former Soviet republic.

Lukashenko, who has been in power in Minsk since 1994, said the detained militants had undergone training in neighboring Ukraine and had been funded by Poland and Lithuania. Relations between Belarus and those two other neighboring, pro-Western states have been strained throughout Lukashenko's time in power.

Lukashenko offered no evidence to support his claim that protesters in his capital had been trained and funded by other nations, nor did he provide any details of the alleged plot.

Protesters in Belarus have been staging civil disobedience actions in reaction to a new labor law that forces citizens to pay the government the equivalent of $250 if they work less than six months in a year, or if they fail to register with state labor exchanges.

Belarus, a country of 9.4 million people, has been mired in recession since 2015. Many opponents of the unpopular tax say they are effectively being penalized by the same government that has failed to reduce unemployment.

Responding to mounting public pressure, Lukashenko suspended collection of the unemployment fee earlier this month, but protests have continued.</s>MALADZYECHNA, Belarus (AP) - The half-million Belarusians who can't find work in their country's stumbling Soviet-style economy face an array of hard choices: register with the state employment exchange, which will force them to "public work" for a pittance; pay $250 for failure to register; or risk being jailed for taking part in a rising wave of protests against the labor law.

Yevgeny Radkevich, a 19-year-old unemployed repairman, chose to protest. Recently freed from a seven-day jail stay after being arrested, he thinks he did the right thing.

"We have to go out and speak of our dissatisfaction, so that the government doesn't consider us to be slaves," Radkevich told The Associated Press in Maladzyechna, a down-at-the-heels city of 95,000 about 60 kilometers (35 miles) northwest of the capital, Minsk.

Over the past two months, such protests have broken out across the country of 9.5 million, sometimes attracting thousands of people - an unusually widespread and persistent show of opposition in an authoritarian country where dissent is generally suppressed.

The initial protests focused on the labor law but have grown to encompass calls for the resignation of President Alexander Lukashenko, whom critics call Europe's last dictator.

There were no arrests at the early protests, and Lukashenko tried to stifle the rising discontent by announcing that collecting the $250 tax would be suspended. But demonstrations continued, with more than 300 people arrested in March alone.

Lukashenko this week sharply raised tensions by claiming that Western intelligence agencies were using a "fifth column" inside the country to cause unrest, and he vowed Friday not to let Belarus repeat the fate of neighboring Ukraine. In 2014, Ukraine's Russia-friendly leader Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in the face of huge popular protests.

The tensions could come to a head on Saturday, when Lukashenko opponents plan a large demonstration in Minsk. Two days before the planned protests, the Belarusian KGB announced the detention of 26 opposition activists and claimed that weapons including grenades had been seized in apartment searches.

International human rights organization Amnesty International warned in a statement Friday that the protest must be "allowed to go ahead unhindered by excessive use of police force or arbitrary detentions."

After 23 years of Lukashenko's authoritarian rule, many Belarusians may have reached their limits. "Basta" - or "That's enough" - is a common slogan on posters at the protests.

"'Basta' means stop sitting in your armchair, stop mocking your people. 'Basta' means get out!" said Alexander Ponomarev, an unemployed electrician who served 10 days in jail after the Maladzyechna protest.

The law that has galvanized anger against Lukashenko says that anyone who works less than six months in a year and does not register with the labor exchange must pay $250. Although that's a huge amount in Belarus - about a month's average salary - an estimated 470,000 unemployed people have not registered with the exchanges, whereas only 30,000 have.

A registered person is required to do "public work" - often crude labor such as street-cleaning - at least one day a month, with compensation as low as $8.50.

The absence of arrests at the earlier protests and the suspension of fine collections suggested that Lukashenko could have been continuing what appeared to be the slow relaxation of his grip. Amid persistent economic troubles, Lukashenko has moved toward better relations with the West. Last year he released all political prisoners, which led to the lifting of European Union sanctions, and the government is seeking a $3 billion International Monetary Fund loan in exchange for economic reforms.

Lukashenko in the past has resorted to widespread crackdowns when opposition grew, notably in the protests that erupted after the 2010 presidential election. Some 700 people were arrested at the time, including seven of the candidates who ran against him.

One of those candidates, Nikolai Statkevich, spent five years in prison but is challenging the system again as an initiator of the current protests, which he sees as a watershed.

"Belarus is waking up ... political demands for regime change are coming," he said.

Anti-government protests in previous years had been largely driven by the young and comparatively well-educated. But many of the protests this year have been in provincial cities, an indication that discontent is spreading in another sector of society.

"For the first time in 20 years, a new face has appeared in Belarusian protests. It is the impoverished people, for whom fear has been replaced by desperation and social protest," said Akexander Klaskovsky, an independent political analyst.
Thousands of people protest in Minsk, Belarus, despite a ban on protests, against a so-called "social parasites" tax on the unemployed.