br23 blog - minsk, belarus

Black spot is a death threat among pirates made of a black spot or mark on a scrap of paper with more specific detail sometimes written on the other side, referred to in the story Treasure Island:

`Thunder!’ he cried. `A week! I can’t do that: they’d have the black spot on me by then. The lubbers is going about get the wind of me this blessed moment; lubbers as couldn’t keep what they got, and want to nail what is another’s. Is that seamanly behaviour, now, I want to know? But I’m saving soul. I never wasted good money of mine, nor lost neither; and I’ll trick ‘em again. I’m not afraid on ‘em. I’ll shake out another reef, matey, and daddle ‘em again.’

So today, there was a flashmob in front of the Belarus’ embassy in Czech Republic, exploiting the topic of the “black spot.”

Some creative designer produced a special “black spot” for Lukashenka, which also has a nice game of words and imagery: it says “Jolly Ryhorych” (Lukashenka’s patronymic) instead of “Jolly Roger”, and there are moustaches and a comb-over on the skull.

The sheets with the “black spots” were made into paper planes and thrown over the fence of the Belarusan embassy. Some paper planes had personal messages to Lukashenka: “Go back to the collective farm”, “You won’t have the third one”, “Skaryna was living in Prague, not in Saint Petersburg”, “We don’t believe in your victory”, “We love Havel, we love Milinkevich”, etc.

About 20-25 people showed up today in front of the embassy. Ten minutes later, police came and asked politely not to throw objects into the territory of the embassy and pick up other paper planes that were lying on the ground. People picked them up and stuffed them into the embassy’s mailbox. After that some people left to protest in front of the Russian embassy, against Putin’s policy of supporting Lukashenka.

Here are the photos from the event:

  • flickr.com/photos/zdymki23/tags/inauguration

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 9th, 2006 at 12:08 am and is filed under Belarusian politics, Czech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.