Belarus, this vast open-air gulag

Photo: TUT.BY Agence France-Presse Tens of thousands of opposition supporters marched in Minsk on August 30, calling for an end to the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, despite a heavy presence of security forces and dozens of arrests.

Patrice Senécal in Warsaw and Vilnius

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The descent into hell begins on the morning of October 12, 2020, in front of the gray apartment building in her neighborhood in Minsk, the Belarusian capital. There, near the threshold, two burly, masked men in dark leather jackets are waiting. “She’s here, finally!” one of them shouts. Mia Mitkevitch, 32, knows then that “something is wrong.” “They looked like bandits…” The professional choreographer had just received, a few moments earlier, a chilling phone call from an agent of the Belarusian Interior Ministry, while she was at work. “This is Detective Evgeny Nikonenko. Go home immediately, we have some questions for you.” »

Belarus was then experiencing a revolutionary period, marked by the unprecedented protest movement triggered on August 9 by electoral fraud. Mia, like so many other Belarusians, shared the mad hope of ousting Alexander Lukashenko, president for more than a quarter of a century, from his throne. “I was convinced that he was going to leave. Even workers from a tractor factory had insulted him!”

But the repression, increasing in the fall of 2020, gradually stifled the protest. So it was with anguish that Mia went upstairs to her apartment, where the door was already open. “This Nikonenko was waiting for me, with other plainclothes police officers,” Mia recalled in a calm voice on that July evening in a café in Warsaw, her new city of exile.

Her “wrong” ? Messages against the dictatorship that she wrote on social media. “At the time, I pretended it was a hack…” But three months later, in January 2021, Mia was arrested.

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At number 3 Karl Marx Street in Minsk, she was forced into an old Soviet classic: a forced “confession” on camera. “If you don’t want your family to join you, you have to confess,” she was told. Before her mock trial for “incitement to hatred,” she was shuttled from prison to prison for weeks. In Okrestina, a detention center known for its torture, “it was awful,” Mia recalls. The cells were overcrowded, the hygienic conditions were appalling. “They had special cells for beating the prisoners with sticks. They called me a traitor to the motherland. I’ve had knee problems ever since. But the worst was yet to come, in Gomel…” She would serve most of her three-year sentence in correctional colony number 4 in this eastern city. A women’s labor camp, where prisoners make military clothing for the Belarusian army.

Photo: Viktor Drachev Archives Agence France-Presse Belarusian prisoners eat lunch in the country’s largest prison, 150 km from Minsk, in Bobruisk, on May 21, 2009.

Political prisoners like Mia are given a yellow badge and are at the mercy of the guards’ moods, who treat them even more brutally. Psychological torture is added to the restriction of visits from relatives. “I tried to take my own life three times,” she confides. Forced labor, sleep deprivation, repeated humiliations… “They tried to break me psychologically. The other prisoners were forbidden to speak to me. They put sand or worms in my food. In a colony, you don’t live, you survive.”

In Belarus, which has become a veritable open-air gulag, this is the fate reserved for those who dared to dream of democracy four years ago. The machine of repression continues to run at full steam, despite a revolt movement that has already been crushed. After having liquidated the independent press and more than a thousand NGOs, imprisoned or forced into exile opponents, it is now devastating the lives of Belarusians who were involved to varying degrees in the uprising. And the families of the detainees are not immune.

Worse than in Russia

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As of August 1, 2024, the human rights organization Viasna, which works in exile, counted 1,391 political prisoners. This is an underestimate, as many, fearing reprisals, decline this description. The Kremlin regime, in comparison, pales in comparison, with a toll half that of Belarus, and this, for a population fifteen times larger. “The higher level of repression in Belarus is explained by the much stronger resistance (70%) of the population towards the regime, not to mention its strong pro-European orientation. In Russia, it is the opposite,” explains Veronica Laputska, an expert for the EAST Center think tank specializing in Eastern Europe. “In 2020, the protests have spread to all spheres of society, from cities to villages,” continues the exiled researcher, who is one of the twenty researchers sentenced in absentia in July, notably for “conspiring to seize power.”

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Every day that passes in Belarus brings its share of arbitrary searches, around ten on average. The regime harasses its detractors even abroad. It stalks the Web, attentive to the slightest comment or photo of a 2020 demonstration. Speaking Belarusian, which has become the idiom of resistance, or wearing white-red-white socks, the colours of the historic Belarusian banner before the USSR, is enough to be apprehended. “One of the regime’s priorities is to convince people that society is atomized and hopeless. Lukashenko is afraid, having seen in 2020 that Belarusians no longer want to live under a dictatorship,” underlines Kanstantsin Staradubet, an activist in Viasna. The regime did indeed announce the release of around twenty political prisoners on 3 July. But this is a parody of an amnesty with a view to appeasement, according to the human rights defender.

In four years, up to 500,000 Belarusians have fled the totalitarian drift. A gap is growing with those who remained in the country. Between disillusionment and an atmosphere of terror, many are withdrawing into themselves. “As soon as someone starts discussing politics, everyone behaves with great caution. People are afraid of repression and are content to live their daily lives,” says Pavel (fictitious name), who withholds both his identity and his location via encrypted messaging. Others express a certain bitterness at the isolation of their country, an accomplice of the Kremlin in the war in Ukraine. “Belarusians do not support Lukashenko or Russia in its war against Ukraine,” another national who remained in the country told Le Devoir, referring to the sanctions imposed on Minsk.

Marked forever

The Belarusian prison experience also contributes to this desire to eradicate any dissident spirit through abuse or degrading treatment. “After their release, many come out forever changed,” Kanstantsin Staradubets regrets, citing cases of strangulation, electrocution, and sexual violence. Malnutrition and poor health care cause blindness and tooth loss in some. “For most of these people, detention causes a sharp deterioration in health and, in the most serious cases, hospitalization or even death,” indicates the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus, Anaïs Marin, in her July report.

Since 2020, six political prisoners have died behind bars, in unclear circumstances. Belarusian dungeons are “a kind of death row,” continues Kanstantsin Staradubets. “Those who serve a sentence of 10 or 25 years know that they will not come out alive. How is that different from execution? ?” The UN, for its part, speaks of possible crimes against humanity.

A dozen opponents are also being held in solitary confinement. Like the husband of Svetlana Tsikhanovskaïa, leader of the democratic forces in exile, from whom she has not heard for over a year. The mother, who became a politician by a twist of fate in 2020, shows off a briefcase with the image of Sergei, her husband and candidate imprisoned by the regime since the summer of 2020, wherever she goes. “I want to believe that he is alive. My young children ask me every day when they will be able to see their dad again.”

Photo: Mikaela Landestrom Agence France-Presse Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya poses for a photo holding a picture of her imprisoned husband Sergei Tikhanovsky in Stockholm, Sweden, on September 12, 2023.

Most of those who regain their freedom decide to leave the country as quickly as possible, fearing that they will be imprisoned again for some absurd reason. Like Mia, who, defying a ban on leaving the country, has since the fall of 2023 found a semblance of normality in Warsaw, despite the painful memories that sometimes resurface. She opened a dance school there, popular with dissidents.

Iryna Serazhonak, 44, is also trying to rebuild her life in exile. With a sad look on her face, she lets her anger burst forth: “They are bandits who have no regard for human life. In Belarus, when you get out of prison, you just get out into an even bigger prison.” In October 2022, the Minsk native was arrested with her husband, in front of her two children. After a hundred days of ordeal in prison, she fled to Lithuania with her family. She, who previously ran a clothing company, now claims to “no longer have anything there.” Return ? “I hope to one day be able to attend the trial of those who committed these crimes against ordinary citizens.”