It is not hard to explain what has been going on in Belarus with political prisoners since 2020. I’ve been doing it for 48 months now.
During the last presidential election, on this day four years ago, Belarusians decided that we didn’t want to live under Lukashenka’s dictatorship anymore. Or any dictatorship. We want simple (yet complex) things – a free and democratic country, an openly and honestly elected leader, and no violence or political repression. Yet the dictator relied on his autocratic power to suffocate the protests. The protests – yes. But not the resistance.
Nevertheless, it is hard to explain what is going on when Belarusian prisons swallow your loved ones. As the wife of a political prisoner, I’ve been going through this for 51 months now.
The last time I saw my husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, in person was in May 2020.
The last time I spoke with him was in October 2020, when, for some unexplainable reason, Lukashenka personally let Siarhei call me. The last time we heard from Siarhei was 9 March 2023.
My husband is being held incommunicado. For my son and daughter, sending letters, postcards and drawing pictures to their father was keeping us morally afloat.
They constantly wrote him but never received any answer. Apart from Siarhei, nine people have been held in incommunicado mode for more than 500 days – including Maria Kalesnikava, Maksim Znak, Viktar Babaryka, Ihar Losik and Mikalai Statkevich.
Writing to people behind bars is a challenge. How to write something, making sure your letter will be delivered? Can you imagine how full the trash bins of the prison censors have been for one and a half years? Our loved ones cannot hear from us. But all the small people, the bricks of Lukashenka’s system, can see our support.
And that’s why we must continue more, louder and harder than ever. So many prisoners don’t receive all the correspondence or are kept isolated, but we don’t even know about that. We don’t know in what conditions our Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski is held. Or Volha Zalatar, a mother of five children. Or journalist Andrei Aliaksandrau. Or activist Andrei Voinich, who is held in a colony while having a critical health condition.
And it’s our joint job to help. I say “our” because we Belarusians share the same values with you. We are also part of the European family. And we cannot fight the dictator and his ill-treatment of the people alone.
We can all take simple steps to show solidarity with repressed people and make it visible to all. How many trash bins do they have in prisons for all the letters and postcards? How much ink do they have to censor our words of support? Let’s not leave them any chance to keep people hidden from the world, our solidarity. Let’s bring freedom to every one of the around 1400 political prisoners in Belarus. But first – take simple steps to support them.
To send a letter you can:
– use the special form online
– use the Dissident.by form
– learn more here
For the list of political prisoners in Belarus check:
– Viasna human rights center
– Dissident.by
– Politzek.me
To read some letters from political prisoners that Index has translated and published, check out our Letters from Lukashenka’s Prisoner project here.
