Mother’s Day 2025: Celebrating the women taking on authoritarian regimes

28 Mar 2025 | Belarus, Egypt, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Russia

On Sunday 30 March, I and mothers like me across the UK, will be waking up to a chorus of “Happy Mother’s Day!”, handmade cards and flowers thrust in our faces as we curse whoever made the decision to put the clocks forward on today of all days.

As anyone who is a mother knows, it’s a hard job. The balancing of family life, careers and – dare I say it – our own social lives; the emotional and mental load that falls to us; attempting to raise tiny people into well-rounded grown-up humans.

Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognise all this, in ourselves and in our own mothers. But this Mother’s Day, I’d like to think about those who are mothering in extreme situations. Those who are fighting for the release of their children, who are held in prison in autocratic regimes after raising their voices. Those who are campaigning for the release of partners, after they stood up to autocrats. And those who are behind bars themselves after speaking out, and have been ripped away from their families.

One of those mothers is Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who ran for president against Alyaksandr Lukashenka in 2020 in Belarus. She is now in exile in Lithuania, where she leads the opposition coalition.

Tsikhanouskaya never wanted to be a politician. She describes herself as having been an “ordinary woman”, where her family was her world. The change of course was thrust upon her when her husband Siarhei Tsikhanouski, who was a willing opposition leader, was arrested in May 2020 then sentenced to 18 years in prison in December 2021.

With her husband incommunicado, Tsikhanouskaya has led the campaign for his release, taken up his political reins and continued to raise their two children.

On Belarus Freedom Day (25 March), just a few days before Mother’s Day, Lukashenka chose the national awareness day to be sworn in after his sham election. Meanwhile, Index on Censorship organised a protest outside the Belarusian embassy in London, writing the names of political prisoners in chalk on the pavement. Meanwhile, Tsikhanouskaya continued to raise the issue of Belarusian freedom on the international stage. From her office in Lithuania, she took time out to talk to me about what happens when the worlds of motherhood and campaigning collide.

“Raising children is a heavy duty, even if you’re an ordinary person,” she told me. And for her, there is an additional toll.

“You always live with the feeling of guilt, because you are not spending enough time with the children,” she said. A relatable feeling. “Very unexpectedly for them, I became […] the person who is defending their daddy, who is defending the country, the leader that had to travel a lot just to raise the alarm about the situation in Belarus.”

She tries to pack in time with her children when she can, but is conscious of not overwhelming them.

“All these years, we are also living with the pain,” she said. Her daughter was only four when her father was imprisoned, and Tsikhanouskaya does everything she can to make sure she remembers his voice and what he looks like. Her daughter writes letters, but they go unanswered.

“It’s very painful for her, and she’s asking, ‘Mum, maybe he is not alive anymore, and you are lying to us, or maybe he doesn’t love us anymore’,” she said.

Tsikhanouskaya is forced to have conversations with her children that no mother would ever want to conduct, about brutality and torture in prisons. Meanwhile her son, who is older, tries not to ask painful questions. He doesn’t want to write letters to his father, because he doesn’t want to flaunt his own freedom.

“I hope, I really believe that they’re learning a lot from these difficult lives. They’re learning how people can sacrifice their lives, their freedoms, a comfortable life, just for something bigger and more important,” Tsikhanouskaya said.

Beyond this, she said she feels the Belarusian people are learning something – that women can lead movements. This, she said, is not the message that was left to them from their Soviet Union past. Meanwhile, she is nourished by the Belarusian people, and by international communities.

This Mother’s Day, Tsikhanouskaya has a message for other mothers fighting similar battles: “Don’t even dare blame yourself that you are a bad mother because you have to be a good leader of your campaign. Your example is the best lesson your children can learn.”

She spares a thought too for the mothers who are political prisoners themselves, and describes how this tactic of separating mothers from their children is “like they cut a piece of your life”.

One of those women is Antanina Kanavalava, a member of Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign, who was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for preparing to take part in a mass riot, related to her role in running a Telegram channel. Her husband was also detained for the same reason, leaving behind their son and daughter, who are both under the age of eight and were taken abroad by their grandmother.

“Dictators know that children are the most effective leverage,” Tsikhanouskaya said. 

In fact, Tsikhanouskaya herself had her children used against her. She was told to leave the country, and was threatened with prison if she refused. 

She said that she was told: “Your husband’s already in prison. Your children will be in an orphanage.”

The winner of the Trustees Award at our Freedom of Expression Awards in 2024 also knows what it means to campaign for your husband’s release while continuing to raise children. Russian human rights activist Evgenia Kara-Murza, the advocacy director of the Free Russia Foundation, continued to raise her three children while she took up the campaign to fight for her husband’s release.

Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested and jailed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in April 2022, after he’d already been poisoned twice. His wife spent the next two years travelling the world and speaking out against her husband’s imprisonment and Putin’s regime. In August 2024, he was finally freed as part of a prisoner exchange.

In Turkey, the Saturday Mothers have held sit-in vigils in Istanbul since 1995, for loved ones who have been forcibly disappeared or murdered. They have spent more than 1,000 Saturdays conducting peaceful demonstrations. After their 700th vigil in August 2018, they faced a crackdown, their peaceful protest broken up with tear gas, water cannons and arrests. Finally in March 2025, 45 members of the Saturday Mothers who had been arrested were acquitted.

Elsewhere in Turkey in 2024, mothers of Crimean political prisoners held a series of exhibitions called I Will Always Wait For You, My Child, demonstrating how their lives had been devastated by the Russian occupation of Crimea. Photos and captions were displayed on easels and online, each with the photo of a mother whose child was ripped away from her, detained and taken to Russia. 

The exhibition was supported by Ukrainian NGO Human Rights Centre ZMINA, the Office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey, and the Crimean Tatar diaspora.

“My children are my air. I will fight for them until my last breath,” wrote Dilyara Abdullaeva, a 70-year-old mother whose sons Uzeir and Teymur were sentenced to 12.5 and 16.5 years in a strict regime colony.

On the UK’s shores, Laila Soueif has been putting her life at risk for her son, British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah. 

El-Fattah has been in and out of prison in Egypt for the last decade, after becoming a vocal pro-democracy campaigner. When his most recent sentence of five years came to an end last September, he was not released. His mother went on a hunger strike for the next five months, and was eventually told by doctors that her life was at risk. 

When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer finally made a call to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in February this year, she switched to a partial hunger strike, to give the negotiation process time to take its course.

Soueif spoke to me over a video call this week, and she described herself as “functioning”.

“I realised that both the Egyptian and the British government are not going [to act], except when there is a crisis. So, I decided to create the crisis,” she said.

While in the past she has felt enthusiastic about campaigning, albeit sometimes exhausted and bored by the situation, since September she has felt very angry.

Soueif’s hunger strike lasted an incredibly long time before she deteriorated, but she doesn’t think that what she has done is particularly extraordinary.

“I really believe that most mothers would be willing to take that kind of risk for their kids,” she said. She is probably right. Regardless, it’s a position no mother wishes to be in.

A hunger strike was not Soueif’s first port of call. She had taken legal routes, staged demonstrations and spoken to the British government. 

“In the end, none of it worked,” she said.

She is now worried she made the wrong choice coming off her hunger strike, as the momentum seems to have been lost. She is considering taking it up again, and can only hope there are motions of clemency from the Egyptian government around the end of Ramadan in a few days’ time. If she does go back on a hunger strike, she will be putting herself at huge risk.

Her message to other mothers fighting for their loved ones is this: “If you start a fight, don’t give up. Because however hard the fight is, to give up without achieving your objective will probably be much, much harder.”

In this fight, she has never been alone. She spoke about the incredible solidarity she has had, and the difference it has made. 

From exile in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya acknowledged that mothers like herself need some time, care and a listening ear too. While she fights for freedom in Belarus, she also continues to be an ordinary woman.

“Save yourself first, and then go and ruin dictatorships,” she said.

Mothers, even when they’re not fighting autocrats, have incredible strength and resilience. Perhaps, as some of these women show, it is the mothers who will get dissidents out of prison, and take down oppressive regimes.