Andrei Kasheuski was an activist of the organizing committee of the party “Belarusian Christian Democracy”, and a candidate for the local council. He earlier distributed the Narodnaya Volya newspaper. He has been repeatedly brought to administrative responsibility for participation in opposition rallies.
Earlier, before he was put into the psychiatric hospital, a lot of pressure was put on Andrei Kasheuski – during just two months, he was stopped six times by policemen in the underground, and in February he was charged with disobedience to authority and sentenced to 10 days of arrest.
On February 26, the police searched the apartment of his parents in Smaliavichy. The house was turned upside down, and the police took a dozen books. They also found handful of gunpowder and several cartridge cases left over from Andrei’s grandfather, a hunter who had a special permit to hunt. The protocol of search was not made. His parents were told that Andrei could face criminal charges for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack in the Minsk metro, because on 26 February the underground was paralyzed due to the SMS with the threat of an explosion, and Andrei was accused of putting a fake bomb in the metro. He says he still does not know if it was just a threat, and if the investigation is held.
On morning of 28 February two policemen came to the house in Smaliavichy again. They knocked on the door for long time, but Andrei did not open. An hour later Andrei’s father came from Zhodino and together they entered the house. Then urgently called the ambulance and took Kasheuski to a psychiatrist in Zhodzina, where Andrei is registered. The doctor quickly signed the man to the compulsory treatment in the “Navinki”, the mental hospital. According to Andrei, it were the police who initiated his placement in hospital.
A few years ago Kasheuski was put on a register with a local psychiatrist, after he hung a white-red-white flag above his parents’ house in Smaliavichy.
Previous experience
It should be noted that the Belarusian authorities are increasingly using punitive psychotherapy as a means of pressure on the political and civil activists.
Thus, on 22 March 2007 Krystsina Shatsikava, civil activist from Mahiliou, was detained in Minsk and brought to Mahiliou, where the KGB interrogation took place. According to the woman, the KGB officers urged Krystsina not to go to the Freedom Day celebration on 25 March in Minsk , but she refused to do so.Almost immediately after Shatsikava exited the building, she was abducted by unknown plain-cloth men, who put her in the car and took her to the psychiatric hospital, where she was tied to the bed and was getting injections of the psychotropic drugs, among which was sibazon, for a few days.
Niasvizh resident Aliaksandr Kruty, against whom the criminal proceedings for publicly insulting President Lukashenko were initiated in May 2003, was detained only in autumn 2011. Several months the civil activist was in Zhodzina prison. Then the Republican Psychiatric Hospital has conducted forensic medical examination. It was found that Aliaksandr Kruty is allegedly mentally ill with paranoid schizophrenia.
On 21 August, 2013 Vitsebsk psychiatrist Ihar Pastnou who was constantly criticizing shortcomings in Vitsebsk health care system, became a victim of punitive psychiatry himself. Ihar Pastnou is a psychiatrist working at the Vitsebsk Regional Centre for Psychiatry and Narcology. Нe was constantly criticizing government policy and the management of health care in the city, filming his interviews and uploading to the Youtube channel. In his interviews he has raised such urgent issues as medical errors and misuse of funds.For the outspoken criticism Ihar Pastnou has had conflicts with his managers. And the Psychiatric Commission at the hospital where Pastnou worked, concluded that he required forced psychiatric treatment for a “psychopathic personality disorder with a mania for persecuting the authorities” The court ruled in a closed sitting that Ihar Pastnou should be forcibly treated in the Vitsebsk Regional Centre for Psychiatry and Narcology.
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