Dissident Bialiatski: ‘My imprisonment in Minsk’
The founder of the Viasna Human Rights Centre was released a few weeks ago, along with a hundred other Belarusian political prisoners. He spoke with Radio Liberty from exile in Lithuania about his four years in jail for protesting Lukashenko's election fraud. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate noted that a thousand more people are still jailed in a “never-ending vicious circle.”
Minsk (AsiaNews) – Thanks to negotiations with Donald Trump's emissaries, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko freed more than a hundred political prisoners in December, including some of the leaders of the 2020 protests, such Maria Kolesnikova, a well-recognised activist, and Ales Bialiatski, a former vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).
Arrested for the first time in 2011, and then again in 2021, Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. After his release, he was exiled to Lithuania, where he gave an interview to Radio Liberty (Радио Свобода, Radio Svoboda) a few days after his arrival.
Founder of the Viasna Human Rights Centre, he became one of the iconic figures of the repression that followed the protest movement sparked by Lukashenko’s rigged election in 2020. In power since 1994, the Belarusian president is the doyen of post-Soviet dictators.
“We thought about leaving Belarus,” Bialiatski said, speaking about the start of the crackdown, “but as a leader of my organisation, I felt that it wasn't right to flee. Our volunteers were ending up in prison, our colleagues were being persecuted, and I decided to stay and share this suffering.”
The 63-year-old dissident explained that he spent four and a half years behind bars as "a continuation of a lifelong commitment."
His first arrest in 2011, on trumped-up charges of embezzlement, and the 10-year prison sentence inflicted upon him, far longer than he expected, had prepared him for more persecution, and when he found himself in solitary confinement in Minsk, he had "the distinct impression of déjà vu”.
He noted that the sentencing was also affected by renewed pressure on dissidents and the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2022, which Belarus backed allowing Russian forces to operate from its territory. "We became military hostages, rather than simple political prisoners,” he said.
Bialiatski expected arrests anyway, and his group had prepared to continue its work even with its leaders in prison.
Some young members had left Belarus, immediately opening an office in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, documenting the repression and speaking about the lives of their friends in the prison camps.
The situation in the country “has become similar to the years of Stalin's terror, with the persecution of the Belarusian intelligentsia in the 1920s and 1930s; history repeats itself."
In prison, he studied his trial papers. When he was informed that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Russian group Memorial, and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, he said he “was shocked. I wasn't expecting it, but I immediately understood that it wasn't a personal honour."
His cellmates greeted the news with great respect. “Think about those watching television discussing whether to award the Nobel Prize to Donald Trump, and sitting next to them on the prison benches is the very person who has just received it. It was a truly surreal situation.”
Prison officials, however, showed little enthusiasm, immediately ordering a search of Bialiatski's cell and those closest to him, meting out a series of disciplinary punishments on baseless grounds, such as having dirty shoes and greeting his jailers without the proper attitude.
Upon his release, almost all of Bialiatski's personal effects were seized, including his diary and letters, over 300 pages of reflections and memoirs, all of which were destroyed.
The detention “was truly inhumane, not because of the physical violence, but because of the legacy of the Soviet system, designed specifically to annihilate people's conscience.”
Despite his liberation, he is still very much aware that more than a thousand political prisoners are still behind bars; “in this system, as many are arrested as they are released, it's a never-ending vicious circle.”
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