How strange it works. We write about all the important things: about hopes of IMF credit, about another price rise, about Libya and about the youngest state in the world – Souther Sudan. At the same time a young boy is being slowly, quietly, methodically killed in the Navapolatsk colony. He was put in a punishment cell for the fifth time in little more than two months. In total he spent more than month of lock-up. He is not a killer, not a recidivist, not a rapist, not a strangler of children or elderly. The only guilt of Mikita Likhavid is that on December 19 he protested against the system, which turn people into prison dust. The system where anyone can find himself in jail the next day and be humiliated by one of the “New Belarusians” – masters of a prison camp.
Punishment isolation cell – is when you are taken for a walk once a week only Do you imagine what it is like to sit in a concrete cell at +30 degrees heat?
Isolation cell is when nothing is allowed, even reading books or newspapers.
Isolation cell is constant hunger
Isolation cell is torture That is what human rights defender have benn talking about.
More than a month of torture…
In late May, during a meeting with her son his mother saw that only half of him was left. His cold hands were thin, almost childish. She kept rubbing the hands to warm them a little. And he tried to sooth her, “Mum, don`t worry, I have fresh air from the vent-light”
I am sure that Mikita cannot tell anybody, what he really has suffered in those two months, because the good sons taboo their complains with simple formula: “Don’t worry, mum…”
The most terrible thing is that they will either kill or mutilate him in these cells. In the colony he positions himself as an unlawfully convicted and does not sign any documents. He wakes up for reveille, goes to a drill but doesn’t do the exercises, just stands. When he is asked – why? – he says that he is convicted unlawfully, and he is not going to subordinate until he is exculpated The whole brigade can see this rebellion and probably there are a lot of those who are convicted illegally. In order for this example not to become catching, in order for other inmates not to appeal for reconsideration of their sentence, Mikita is being sent to the punishment cell time after time. Ten days of lock-up, fifteen, five, twenty…
If he would go on hunger strike, or cut his veins – that would be a scandalous event and administration of the colony would have to write explanatory notes to all instances and woul unlikely be justified, but Mikita have chosen a different way of protest, in fact – different form of suicide. And everything what is happening now seems to be within legal boundaries.
The worst part is that we understand everything: no court in our country would revise sentence of Mikita Likhavid and other political prisoners. Because it was said by the leader of the country: “The sentences are just, there are no political prisoners in Belarus”. Even if Mikita is left to rot in jail, nether judge Natallia Pykina, nor prosecutor Anton Zaharouski won’t admit that they have a human life on their consciousness. Nor will admit it the superior of Navapolatsk colony Aliaksandr Sivokha. Nor will do the superior of that superior Although they all understand deep inside that this boy is not a criminal but a hero.
“Official” ideologists are now going to lose the battle for minds and hearts of Belarusians, because they are fighting such lads – slim, big-eyed, but unbending in their desire to live in a free and fair country, while their heroes with big salaries first train to break bricks with their heads, and then go out into the streets in gangs of three and four and attack peaceful people getting some savage satisfaction from it.
And that is why, if I had an opportunity to meet Mikita Likhavid, I would ask him to take care do these ill-fated morning exercise. Because in order to stop those inhuman creatures to run the show, the normal people must live and they should live long.
Sviatlana Kalinkina
skalinkina.livejournal.com
Additional information by Belarusian HRH
On 19 July the leaders of socio-political organisation “For Freedom” Movement” held a meeting with the administration of the colony where Mikita Likhavid was sent to serve 3,5 years of imprisonment.
The head of Navapolatsk colony Aliaksandr Sivokha stated that Mikita Likhavid is not being treated in a preconceived manner, and that multiple punishments by isolation cell are fair. According to Sivokh, Likhavid breaks the order of the day as he refuses to do morning exercises. The head of the colony also informed that Likhavid is regularly examined by doctors who confirm that he is healthy.
Belarus has suffered the wave of repression after the protests of 19 December 2010 against the results of last presidential elections: around 700 people were detained and beaten up, 42 people were accused of organisation and participation in mass riots. 30 of them are still behind the bars, sentenced to 2 to 6 years of imprisonment.
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