But Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya wants her not to forget her daddy’s voice. Jailed dissidents have started to disappear in Belarus. From Respekt.
The half-forgotten regime of the dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka is back on the front pages of international newspapers – all because of a mystery. In Belarus, people who are top objects of state supervision and care have started to disappear. And their whereabouts are not the only mystery surrounding them.
A Strange Message
The Belarusian president in exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya last saw her husband, the well-known dissident and blogger Syarhey, on 8 July 2023. On that day, state TV broadcast a 30-second video with a single objective – to contradict a Twitter post by Tsikhanouskaya five days previously: “Today I received a strange and horrific message. An unknown person wrote to me, saying that my husband had died in the Belarusian prison in Zhodzina.”
“Here is proof that that is not the case,” said the TV presenter, showing a video recording with no audio. It shows the somewhat blurry silhouette of a man with some kind of package in his hand, as he is escorted by a prison guard into a cell with four beds. Only one of them has a mattress on it. The inmate stands with his back facing the bed, making head movements front-to-back and side-to-side to exercise his muscles. Then he sits down at a small table with a bowl with some kind of food, as the camera focuses several times on the date of recording of 5 July 2023, written in bold in the right-hand corner of the video. Then the sequence ends.
“The first thing that came to mind when I saw it was whether that was indeed Syarhey. I was taken aback by what he looked like, how skinny he was, the different expression on his face. I tried to take in every detail of his face, focusing on how he walked, how he carried his body, whether it was his way of moving. I must have played that video a thousand times, day after day. It could have been him, but I cannot say for certain,” says Tsikhanouskaya in her office in exile on the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania.
On her desk is a document with a glued-on photo of her husband, but he does not look anything like the man in the video. The photo was taken before he was jailed. In it, Syarhey Tsikhanouski has a big smile on his face. You can see immediately that this is a strong, healthy man with lots of energy. “I have no idea what is going on with him. Even if it really is him in the video, the recording could have been made at any previous time. They could have inserted whatever date they wanted,” Tsikhanouskaya says.
Either way, Tsikhanouski basically disappeared 10 months ago. The last verifiable trace of his existence is from 8 March 2023, when he was briefly visited by his lawyer in the Zhodzina prison, 50 kilometers east of Minsk. Belarusian legislation prevents the lawyers of political prisoners from saying anything specific about their meetings. Otherwise, they, too, could end up in jail.
“The lawyer only told me that they had met and that he was sending regards to the children. On the following day, she was detained for several hours and then for no reason, they took away her license,” Tsikhanouskaya says.
Staying Fit
She was already the fourth lawyer representing Syarhey that this had happened to. Even though his wife managed to immediately find him a new lawyer through her friends in Minsk, the authorities would not let the new lawyer visit him. The guards argued that Tsikhanouski had no interest in visits from a lawyer, because he had not asked for them. Rules in Belarus say that unless the inmate gives a prior written agreement, nobody from the outside can visit them. With any prisoner, the authorities can just start claiming that this is the case. “You cannot verify whether that is indeed true,” Tsikhanouskaya says.
Her husband is not only person who has gone off the radar in Belarus. At around the same time as Syarhey Tsikhanouski, other prominent prisoners also “stopped being interested” in seeing anyone, including the politician Maria Kalesnikava, Lukashenka’s former presidential challenger Viktar Babaryka (his poor state of health is mentioned as a reason for the authorities hiding him), and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, as well as the blogger Ihar Losik and his wife Darya.
“My last video call with Maria took place on 22 July, I got her last letter on 22 February. They no longer let her father or her lawyers visit her, they keep on repeating she probably no longer wants to talk to us,” says Maria’s sister Tatsiana Khomich.
Before a total ban on all visits, Syarhey Tsikhanouski already had the strictest regime for contact with the outside world. Starting in May 2020, when he announced he would run against Lukashenka in the presidential race, he was deemed his main challenger, and therefore also an enemy. The blogger was popular with the public and frequently criticized Lukashenka’s authoritarianism and corruption, so he had a chance of beating him. To prevent this from happening, the electoral commission, controlled by the regime, refused to register Tsikhanouski’s presidential candidacy. That was the moment when his wife – with no great enthusiasm on her part – replaced her husband.
At first Tsikhanouskaya did not want to run at all, but when Lukashenka had Syarhey arrested, she took up the baton and entered the race herself. It probably did not even cross Lukashenka’s mind that the woman, who unlike her husband was unknown and not particularly publicly engaged, could attract the attention of crowds of people, win massive public support, and play an unexpected, historic role. But that is exactly what happened. Tsikhanouskaya won [independent Belarusian observers found evidence of large-scale electoral fraud – Transitions note], Lukashenka refused to accept her victory, had her arrested by the KGB secret service, and used the threat of violence to force her out of the country.
In the meantime, Lukashenka had Syarhey sentenced to 18 years in prison in a manipulated trial, for inciting hatred against his regime. Tsikhanouskaya was accepted by the West as the winner of the election and started acting as president-in-exile. Lukashenka prevented her from any type of contact with her husband. “Only our two children could exchange letters with Syarhey, with the last letter arriving in March [2023]. He was telling them to listen to me, advising the older son to practice sports to stay fit. Since then, we haven’t received anything,” Tsikhanouskaya says.
The politician says she openly talks to her children about their father’s situation. She’s trying to keep him present in their lives as much as possible. “Some time ago, our eight-year-old daughter came home from school, saying a Ukrainian classmate was telling her tanks worked well against bad people. She suggested we should also buy one and use it to free daddy. I try to explain to the kids that not everything is possible,” she says.
“At any rate, Syarhey is still here with us. Rather than put up paintings, I hung his photos on the walls of our apartment in Lithuania. We watch videos with him, so that our two kids do not forget his voice.”
The Most Dangerous Time
One aspect of family members losing contact with prisoners is that they often do not even know in which Belarusian prison they should be looking for them. Some time ago, several relatives received a brief message from the authorities, informing them that their family members would be transferred to other penal colonies. Where exactly, neither the family nor the lawyers were told. In dictatorships such as Belarus or Russia, transfer between prisons is “the most dangerous period in the life of a political prisoner,” said Evgenia Kara-Murza, the wife of the imprisoned Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a recent interview for the Meduza website.
“The transfer can last for months. There is no law that would stipulate its maximum duration. During the transfer, inmates can pass through a number of temporary prisons before reaching their final destination. They can spend days, weeks, or even months in any of these places. The prison administration is not obliged to provide any information about their whereabouts, including their state of health and their needs. Thus, the inmates can easily disappear for a pretty long time. There are even cases when people just disappeared,” Evgenia Kara-Murza said. “It is of utmost importance to keep the names of the inmates in the public eye and keep on demanding that the authorities provide information on their whereabouts.”
That is exactly what Maria Kalesnikava’s sister Tatsiana did together with her father when they found out in late 2022 that Maria was no longer in her prison in the town of Homel. That’s where she was placed in 2021 after being sentenced to 11 years for participating in an alleged coup d’etat and for calls to undermine national security. She had led protests against Lukashenka’s electoral fraud and when the regime tried to force her into exile in Ukraine, she tore up her passport at the border as she was being escorted by the police. She was then handed the exemplary punishment of being sent to the Homel prison.
Before one of his regular prison visits, her father, who lives in Belarus, was informed by the prison services that Maria was no longer at Homel. “We immediately started investigating what had happened. The authorities kept silent but an anonymous source told us that Maria was having health problems and was hospitalized in a [normal] hospital outside the prison. They didn’t let her father and her lawyer visit her. At the hospital, doctors accompanied by the Belarusian KGB political police only told them that she had undergone emergency surgery. They refused to provide further details,” says Khomich, who lives in exile herself. Because of the shady activities surrounding her sister, she roused journalists and Western politicians to demand answers from the Belarusian regime.
When top EU politicians did that, the Belarusian government finally announced that Kalesnikava was stabilized and would return to the prison in Homel. During an interview with Respekt in January 2022, when she was still allowed to answers the questions of foreign journalists via her lawyer, Kalesnikava described the conditions in the jail with the following words: “People say you can get used to anything, but I have been here for a year and I still haven’t got used to the ice-cold water running from the tap, to the paint peeling off the walls, to the fact that I cannot properly sit down, that there’s no fresh air here, no light, no sun.”
According to her sister, a month later Kalesnikava ended up in a solitary confinement cell of three square meters. In order to fight the cold in the harsh Belarusian winter, she would walk as many as 15,000 steps on the spot. “Later we found out from Maria that she had perforated stomach ulcers and almost died. She lost consciousness several times. She complained that she was not feeling well, but the prison authorities only reacted once the situation was critical. They saved her at the last moment,” says her sister.
Her father last talked face to face with Kalesnikava last December, when she returned to her previous jail after her surgery. Their meeting lasted 10 minutes and the authorities did not allow any further meetings. “Until we receive information to the contrary, we think that she is probably still at Homel,” her sister says.
Fighting Fear With Fear
“We do have some kind of office here with our colleagues, but it is not safe for us to use it for meetings with visitors from abroad. It could make it easier for the Belarusian KGB to track us down and jeopardize our work. That is why we try to move around in less visible ways, using anonymous places,” says Kanstantsin Staradubets, a leader of the largest Belarusian human rights organization Viasna, during a meeting with Respekt. This explains why he chose a small room in a museum in central Vilnius for the interview.
Similar to Tsikhanouskaya, Viasna, too, moved its activities from Belarus to the capital of Lithuania after the manipulated 2020 elections. Together with Poland, Lithuania hosts most Belarusians who live in involuntary exile. The organization’s founder, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, was sentenced to 10 years for “illegal activities” against the regime. His colleagues who do not want to end up in the same situation continue their work across the border.
“We are in contact with the families of the prisoners, providing them with legal advice, with humanitarian aid, we try to get medicines into the prisons. It doesn’t always work out, but sometimes it does. I cannot tell you the details. The Belarusian authorities could find out what some of our channels are and put a stop to them,” Staradubets says. His organization is not the only NGO that is working to support political prisoners in Belarus.
Another such NGO is called Belarusian House. It operates out of Warsaw, where it got a house from the country’s government, located in a quiet neighborhood close to the Vistula River. It supports those who have gotten out of jail and want to leave for the West, helping them to arrange all the required documents. Typically, their journey is through Russia and Georgia. The organization also provides material and financial assistance to the families of prisoners.
“In this way, we are taking care of 22 families,” Aleksandra Zawistowska of Belarusian House says in her office, covered with posters of the country’s opposition movement.
“Lukashenka is afraid of the internal resistance of Belarusians. By intensifying repression, by making prisoners disappear, he is trying to make society fearful, to rid himself of his own fear, and to strengthen his position,” replies Zawistowska to the question of how she interprets the series of mysterious disappearances of prisoners. At first sight, it would seem that the Belarusian dictator would not need to do such a thing. Back in 2020, the stolen election brought out hundreds of thousands of unhappy Belarusians into the streets for months. Since he became president in 1994, Lukashenka had never witnessed such defiance, and it took him by surprise. But then he used the army and the KGB to crack down on the protests, arresting the leaders of the revolution or forcing them abroad. Many so-called “ordinary people” also ended up in jail.
“People are no longer in the streets, but they carry their unhappiness with Lukashenka in their minds. And he knows that this unhappiness can bubble up to the surface at any time. Especially as even those who have already been kept in jail for a long time are still not giving up their fight. Throwing the prisoners into a total information vacuum is one way that Lukashenka is trying to break them down mentally and physically. At the same time, he’s hoping that the society as a whole will eventually forget about them,” Tsikhanouskaya says.
I Know What It Would Mean
According to Viasna, 1,470 political prisoners are currently in Belarusian jails, and three of them have already died. Those who are not as high-profile as Tsikhanouski or Kalesnikava are sometimes lucky and can walk free after they serve their sentence. (This is not a general rule, however. Some of them are handed new charges and have to remain in prison.) One who has managed to walk free is the former footballer and journalist Aliaksandr Ivulin, a participant in anti-government protests, who got out last year after two years in prison and left for Poland. “When I was in, it certainly helped me when people from the outside took an interest in me. I knew I was not on my own,” Ivulin tells Respekt in his favorite Belarusian cafe in Warsaw.
Human rights experts say that if Lukashenka managed to achieve his objective of people losing interest in the political prisoners, it wouldn’t just impact their mental well-being but could threaten their very lives, as authorities could get an impression that they can now do whatever they want with them. One website run by the pro-democracy forces is therefore mapping who is missing, for how long, and what is known about their state. Politicians in exile and their relatives try to talk about them as much as they can, repeatedly calling on big international organizations such as the Red Cross to monitor the situation on the ground. And they’re demanding answers from Lukashenka himself.
“Some people say we should make a deal with Lukashenka, strike a compromise. I’m trying to think rationally and I know what this would mean. If we did it, he would consider it as his victory. He would know that the resistance would die down and he would then jail even more people,” says Tsikhanouskaya.
“My children need their father, and the same is true of thousands of other children of political prisoners. My husband, all the other inmates are relying on us. They are hoping that we will never give up fighting for them, even though we cannot tell them that at the moment.”
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Ondrej Kundra is deputy editor-in-chief at the Czech newsweekly Respekt, where this article originally appeared. Republished by permission. Translation by Matus Nemeth.
