Valzhyna Mort: Free the political prisoners in Belarus

It has been hard for me to sleep because I have thought a lot about a person you hardly know. He was kidnapped in the middle of the day, in the middle of the cleanest city in Europe. It is not the nice kind of European metropolis you might think of, but the kind that has been bombed to pieces and then rebuilt, the European variant of forgetting all human rights.

He was kidnapped five days after turning 39, three months ago. Since then he has been a prisoner without trial, as we usually think (and here we probably think the same) a political prisoner.

All Belarusian lawyers know that all Belarusians live in a single large prison, but in the largest prison there are also ordinary prisons, like in a Russian doll, with small cells where people try to sleep in widely circulated newspapers. Maksim Znak was part of the legal team behind presidential candidate Viktar Babaryka, who was jailed in June, a month before the elections that were supposed to mark Alexander Lukashenko’s 26th year as president of the cleanest country in Europe. A lawyer like Maksim, who was also behind opposition stars Svjatlana Tsichanouskaja and Maria Kalesnikava (the former lives in exile today, the latter is incarcerated), could well have carried a bag packed with warm clothes, a pillow and a toothbrush for a life in the cell.

September 9 tested his colleagues catch up, but Maksim stifled the talks and got one word wrong: “masks.” People watched as he was taken away by strangers, whose faces were hidden by black robber hats. The street bathed in warm September light, as if it were really the cleanest in Europe.

What do you know about how prisoners feel in the cleanest country in Europe? Adult men are said to be abused until they cry like children and ask to be killed. That song is heard from the cells of women. That the cells are so full that it is impossible to breathe. Since August 9, when the majority of the country’s population refused to accept the inauguration of his sixth consecutive term, Lukashenko has allowed the security forces to respond to peaceful demonstrations with brutal violence, mass arrests and torture.

Today, no one is safe in Belarus, be it a lawyer, a teacher, a doctor, a factory worker, or a teenager who goes out in the morning to buy milk. At any moment, plainclothes men dressed as soldiers can put a sack on his head and then his family has to search for days through lists of names in prisons and hospitals before finding his name. At best, you are incarcerated, not hospitalized. When they release you two weeks later, you say, “I was lucky. Others were beaten even more ”.

Belarus is also said to be in the middle of Europe.

I guess you don’t feel Maksim Znak, but I do. We went to high school together. It is true that there was nothing “in between” during those years. The Soviet empire collapsed and made our high school years seem like a dramatic beginning or ending to all of world history. Maksim and I were not close friends, but two images have lingered in my memory, and in the three months that have passed since he was arrested, they have moved up and down between my chest and my throat, like coarse grains of sand in a Hourglass.

When we were in fifth grade, a new subject was added to the curriculum: the history of Belarus. But should a country have their own story? Scandal! The only history our parents had learned was that of communism. Before the 1990s, only ideology had a history; people only had their silence. The new history books were badly printed, badly pasted, and carelessly placed; they quickly crumbled, like decks of cards. They never contained illustrations, not a single portrait or map. The covers were the same for all grades: white, with a red stripe down the middle. They were the colors of the country’s new flag, which was also our old and historic flag.

Once we realized that we had a history older than the Soviet Union, all kinds of things began to emerge from the archives, the cabinets, the graves: in addition to the flag, also a national anthem, a language, names of princes who were not called Nikolai or Alexander, places of mass executions. , martyrs, heroes, artists, scientists, a fight for freedom both against Poland and against Russia, all under the white-red-white banner. When Lukashenko was sworn in as president for the first time, in 1994, it also happened alongside a white-red-white flag that looked to his side like a silent bride.

Today when random people inspected on the street, it is not the drug police are looking for those flags. At the entrance of the jail and the prisoner transports, they usually display a white-red-white flag, a symbol of our independence. If inmates avoid stepping on it, they will be beaten with the baton. Everyone is forced to step on the flag that once surrounded our first history books, the one that loomed like a silent bride alongside the president who would soon begin to destroy anyone who refused to find himself in his autocracy.

As I write this, I am hearing about Raman Bandarenka, 31 years old. He left his apartment in Minsk one night in November after a van without a registration number stopped in the courtyard and released a group of plainclothes men disguised as soldiers. They were there to remove the white-red-white ribbons tied to a fence, like a wish tree. Raman never approached them, possibly he did not even address them. He went out to see how men who behaved like soldiers spent the night cutting white, red and white ribbons on a farm where none of them lived. He was dragged into the truck, disappeared without a trace for an hour and a half, was spotted at a police station and then sent to the emergency room in a coma. Doctors gave him a chance to survive. But Raman, ten years younger than Maksim, had been killed by that white-red-white band.

Every week, doctors are forced to treat hundreds of people who have been brutally beaten by the police. When doctors protest against police violence, they are also caught in prisoner transports, like dangerous criminals, fifty at a time.

At school, that was up front US. Now we had connected our white-red-white history books, the first of their kind. Our school actively participated in various knowledge competitions on the subject. I was on the school team and Maksim Znak was our leader. I see him in front of me in a shapeless wool sweater that cannot decide for his own color, with his hair in all directions. He will lead us to victory. The first question of the contest: “What was Belarus today 16,000 years ago?” It’s as simple as two plus two, as obvious as “one in four people in Belarus died during World War II.” 16,000 years ago: the ice age, Belarus was, of course, covered in ice. We lean our heads against each other, like the petals of a carnivorous flower around an insect, and whisper, half shouting: “Ice age! Ice Age! “” I take it, “says Max, coming of age and pressing the button. But when he grabs the microphone, he says:” Green meadows and flowering trees. We believe that 16,000 years ago Belarus was full of green meadows and trees in flower “. The rest of us gasp. Sighs We lose that round. Because he said that? He himself could not give any explanation.

Yes, why did he say that? I’ve asked that question multiple times over the years. Now Maksim Znak is a political prisoner in this country, whose people are kidnapped by a fool, an exemplary clean country in the center of Europe, where people are arrested for singing, for making the victory sign, and I wonder if it is. he said because it was impossible not to. At the behest of the moment, at the beginning of the new era in history, which began with Lukashenko’s inauguration, something in him refused to accept the obvious. He took the first sheet of our ruined history book and replaced the ice age with flowering trees.

The prisoners have describedt the biting cold of the cell night. How they piled newspapers in their socks, how they have lain and cuddled on bare iron bars all night; mattresses and pillows are not allowed. The genocide of Belarusian peasants during the German occupation in the 1940s was codenamed “Operation Winterzauber”. Refuse to join the ice age of genocide, refuse to join the ice age of the prison world. Are you talking about flowering, Max?

The second memory fragment is from a time when all the fifth graders gathered in the auditorium. We hum and make fun of the teachers, who grind something on stage. The girls are wearing trouser suits that would make Hillary Clinton moan loudly, and their hairstyles could certainly be used as models in physics or technology. Some parents are there, not mine. A mother takes the stage and we get off expectantly: “From whom? Why? “Now she is there and speaks, only after a while I understand that what comes out of her mouth is a poem. Not the kind of poems we could read in school, but a contemporary poem, with a political flavor , an aroma that seemed new to us. A line is repeated: Come on, Maltese! (“Come on guys!”).

Thanks to that line, I manage to find the poem again. “Come on, guys!” Written by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. It is Maksim’s mother who reads:

“Come on guys. / If we’re no longer ruthless / We’re not young either. / Come on guys, / but remember that as you get older / you also become less ruthless, / your compassion grows. / Other types, self-fulfilling and despotic, / They should stand there with wet fists. / Come on guys. “

Why just that line? had he sat down? Because I remember it with a question mark. What kind of “come on” was really a question, I have wondered. Max’s mom asked our kids for something, but what? Could you imagine the cruelty that the Belarusian riot police would direct against the defenseless and peaceful people? When she stood there and read the poem about the boys with the sweaty fists, could she already see the terror of the day in front of her?

The men in black robber hats who took Maksim have also been children once, and somewhere someone sits and remembers them as they were in high school, when nothing was “in between” but the dramatic beginning of the story. or in its dramatic ending. Come on guys. The fact that Maksim has not been released or is awaiting trial can only mean one thing: he has not been broken.

The one who once led my school team in a history contest has been a political prisoner for three months in a country occupied by a fool. Bloom, Max. “Be sure to bloom,” as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, “where the whirlwind roars and whips.

Translation from English: Nils Håkanson

First published in the American magazine The Baffler

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