Belarusian Protests

This is an email I received today from Andrei Kureichyk, our friend and fellow revolutionary in Minsk. We had the wonderful opportunity to meet him after our reading last June of Playing the Victim. We are attempting to get his plays translated/produced here in the States.

Dear Doug,
Thank you so much for your letters. What is going now in Belarus is wonderful and terrible at the same time. The country is changing. People are beginning to believe in freedom. They begin to struggle for their rights. I see revolution in minds and hearts. I spent last 4 days on streets. I saw thousands of people who went to peaceful demonstrations. And I saw how hundreds of people were arrested, bited and put in prison. But I believe that it is the agony of dictatorship. This process can not be stopped. Tommorow will be the main manifestation. I believe in Belarusians. I'll be with them till the very end. I'm now in a kind of stress, out of control, so I'll write you details later.
Hope to see you,
Andrei

For those who don't know, Alexandr Lukashenko won a new five year-term by a landslide in a vote denounced as a farce by the opposition and criticized in the West as undemocratic. The tension began as peaceful protests over the rigged March 19 elections resulted in the police storming a tent camp in the main square. Hundreds were arrested in the pre-dawn raid Friday. The European Union and the United States said that they will impose sanctions on Lukashenko, who they say has turned Belarus into Europe's last dictatorship since his first election in 1994, and both called for an immediate end to the crackdown on the opposition.