The students, Andrei and Sasha, said security forces demanded that they unlock their smartphones and surrender the names of gays in Minsk and Moscow. They slammed our heads against the door frame, threatened to report us to the university and said that this was just the beginning.”
They wanted to expose an underground network of gay people in Belarus, following the example of Russia, he said of the autumn raid. 'They openly told us that if it is banned in Russia, then it should be banned in Belarus too.'
Belarus decriminalized homosexuality in 1994 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the deeply conservative country under authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko doesn't recognize same-sex marriages.
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