The brutal repression in Belarus already forgotten: Piotr Markielau arrested again

Being liberal in Italy, in a country with a strong statist and collectivist connotation, can be very frustrating. Being a liberal in Belarus, the last communist dictatorship in Europe, is definitely dangerous. This is demonstrated by the story of Piotr Markielau, coordinator of Students for Liberty for Eastern Europe, who was arrested, for the third time in a year , on November 15th.

In the latter case, his "fault" is to have attended an unauthorized funeral, a celebration in memory of the painter Roman Bondarenko . Just to make a brief summary: since President Aleksandr Lukashenko was re-elected on 9 August (a very easy undertaking, since all the opponents have been arrested or exiled), every Sunday entire squares are filled with hundreds of thousands of protesters. against obvious electoral fraud. The police repression was very hard right from the start. The arrests, according to data from the Viasna Human Rights Center , are 16,000 since the start of the campaign. On 11 November, the painter Bondarenko had dared to protest against a police patrol intent on removing the red and white ribbons (the colors of the old Belarusian independence flag, used by the demonstrators), the policemen beat him to death for the injuries sustained after a day of agony. The crowd of Belarusians who gathered to celebrate his disappearance was seen as a subversive gathering and the police intervened again, with a round-up. Among those arrested was Piotr Markielau, already in the sights of the police for the whole year. On November 18, in a lightning trial he was sentenced to 15 days of administrative detention for violating article 23.34 of the Belarusian penal code: violation of the rules for public meetings.

Markielau's parents, also opponents of the regime, had both ended up in prison in the previous days. The father, a doctor, Dmitri Markelau, was arrested on November 2 and released on November 10, for expressing solidarity with students expelled from the medical university for political reasons. A brief detention of a week, but it cost him dearly: in prison he contracted a disease that has all the symptoms of Covid-19 . And this in a country that, since the beginning of the epidemic in Europe, officially boasts very low numbers of infections (128,000) and deaths (1,119). The mother, Irina Markelava, was instead arbitrarily arrested on November 2 and then again on November 8, the second time for no apparent reason. In fact, he was not participating in any demonstrations, the only sign of dissent was his umbrella, with the white and red colors of the old Belarusian flag.

The arrests of Piotr Markielau are now recurring. On July 29, he was captured by the Omon (Ministry of the Interior troops) while protesting in front of Prison No. 1 in Minsk, in solidarity with the hunger strike initiated by the wife and mother of Dmitri Furmanov, detained for political reasons. Once arrested, Piotr Markielau was sentenced the following day to 12 days of administrative detention, again for violating Article 23.34 of the Penal Code. On 11 May, Piotr Markielau was sentenced to 10 days of administrative detention, not for having participated in a demonstration (a flash mob to counterbalance the Soviet victory parade on 9 May), but for having filmed agents of the KGB during the trial of the demonstrators.

Listing all these arrests does not convey what a prison experience in Belarus is. During the detention period in May , for example, activists suffered systematic sleep deprivation: “In the cell, they never turned on the night lights, even at night they left the strongest light used for the day. I was constantly stung, my clothes were infested with fleas. For three out of ten nights they woke me up and forced me out of bed every hour and a half, or two hours. During the day, they took away our mattresses and forbade us to lie down, not even to sit on the bed (which was, in practice, a metal grid) ". Held in a cell with three alcoholics, the dissident was deprived of any possible distraction: "I could not read books, newspapers, I had no pencils or paper, I could not send letters or tickets". Even the hour of air could turn into torture: "Once they dragged me into the 'courtyard' (a cell on the roof, without a ceiling, 5 meters by 5 meters) wearing only a T-shirt, in the middle of a cold night ".

Irina Markelava underwent treatment, if possible, even worse . Once loaded on a police cell phone, along with about thirty other arrested, she was tortured with a gas: “We smelled a strong smell, as if they had put in gas. Everyone started coughing. And I was suffocating. For the first time in my life, I had an attack of laryngospasm, a condition in which the vocal cords are closed and you can neither inhale nor exhale. People close to me started screaming for help, saying I was sick, but the doors were closed and none of the officers could hear ”. Once downloaded from their mobile phones, the half-suffocated prisoners went through a terrible first prison experience. At the entrance to the Zhodzina prison, the authorities had spread the red-white flag as a doormat, to be trampled by the arrested and humiliated. A woman who refused was beaten with clubs. Irina Markelava and the other prisoners were stripped in public, forced to stand in unnatural poses, to wear them out. Once the "visit" passed, 25 of the incarcerated women were crammed into a cell suitable for 6 people, without even a place to sit.

For anyone familiar with Soviet history, these tales unfortunately appear familiar. In Belarus, even the names have remained the same: the agents of the Ministry of the Interior are still called Omon and the KGB secret services. The life of a liberal in a communist regime is still as difficult as it was then and it takes great courage to stay consistent. And the question that arises spontaneously, however, is also another: what is a communist regime still doing in Europe? And who continues to legitimize it?

The post The brutal repression in Belarus already forgotten: Piotr Markielau arrested again appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-brutale-repressione-in-bielorussia-gia-dimenticata-di-nuovo-arrestato-piotr-markielau/ on Thu, 26 Nov 2020 04:35:00 +0000.