Фото: t.me/tsikhanouskaya
Head of the United Transitional Cabinet Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya took part in a youth side event of the Munich Security Conference dedicated to digital democracy. The event, titled “The New Public Square Is the Screen: Rethinking Democracy in the Digital Sphere,” brought together around 200 participants, including experts, students and journalists.
The discussion was organised jointly with AmerikaHaus, the Office of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and the Junge DGAP youth network at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Addressing participants, Tsikhanouskaya stressed that for Belarus the internet has become not just a means of communication, but a space where millions of people were able to find one another and organise. She noted that it was digital tools — from platforms for parallel vote counting to Telegram channels and VPNs — that made it possible to prove the victory of democratic forces in the 2020 election and to continue coordinating protests even when the authorities completely shut down the internet. According to the democratic leader, the Belarusian case shows how technology in the hands of civil society becomes a catalyst for change, while in the hands of dictators it turns into an instrument of surveillance and censorship.
“Some of you may have seen the German film ‘Good Bye, Lenin!’. It shows very well how propaganda works: it creates a ‘correct’ picture of the world, builds cosy illusions and makes people passive. When people believe that everything is stable and under control, they stop asking questions. They stop participating. I, for example, stayed away from politics my whole life. I was just a housewife, a mother of two children. Like many others, I was told that politics is dangerous, that it is better not to interfere, that there are ‘smarter people’ who know better. And many of us lived in this illusion. Without a doubt, technology changed everything. Sometimes I am asked: what made your movement possible? ‘Thank God for the internet,’ I reply,” the politician said.
Tsikhanouskaya noted that it was technology that made the 2020 protest movement possible and that it continues to make it possible to stay connected with society after five years in exile. Among the tools and initiatives she mentioned were cloud services, VPNs, TikTok, Zoom, artificial intelligence, the work of cyber partisans, the Belarusian Hajun project and the SVAE programme.
The democratic leader paid particular attention to the responsibility of global corporations. According to her, technologies are not neutral: in the hands of dictators they turn into weapons of surveillance and censorship, while for democratic societies they are instruments of freedom.
Tsikhanouskaya addressed representatives of technology corporations with a call to take the side of democracy. She stressed that tech giants must stop indulging regimes in their abuses and more actively support national identities, in particular the Belarusian language on their platforms. This, in her view, is an important element of protection against the influence of the “Russian world.”
“In our case, national identity, language and culture are also weapons against the so-called ‘Russian world’. Dear friends, the struggle for democracy is literally happening everywhere — from Kyiv to Tbilisi, from Cuba to Iran. It is being waged in lines of code and in cloud services as well. And I know that we can and we will win this struggle — together,” she concluded.
The discussion was also attended by executive director and CEO of The Reckoning Project Janine di Giovanni, DW News Africa correspondent in East Africa Edith Kimani, political scientist and journalist Kari Odermann, senior researcher at the DGAP Centre for Geopolitics, Geo-economics and Technology Katja Muñoz, and Junge DGAP representative Natalia Valeria Müller. The panel was moderated with the participation of Natalia Valeria Müller and Alina Kharisova.