The 2024 Call has now been updated to include this update.
ABC Belarus currently supports 28 anarchist prisoners in Belarus, 7 of them are long term prisoners:
- Aleksandr Zaytsev – Aliaksandr was detained on August 22, 2021 near the cottage of the chairman of the Supreme Court Sukalo. Aliaksandr was accused of attempted arson of the cottage (part 1 of article 14 and part 2 of article 289 of the Criminal Code Attempt of terrorist act in a group of persons). According to our information, he went to the case with the provocateur Akulich Dmitriy Alexandrovich, whom they met on a day when Alexander was detained on administrative article 23.34 (participation in an unauthorized protest, now is 24.23 of the Administrative Code) at the protests in November 2020. The status of Akulich in the criminal case is not unknown to us, but most likely he is being held as a witness with a fake name of Sergeenko. It is noteworthy that Akulich was given a real passport with a fake name to provoke Zaytsev.
- Akihiro Gaevsky-Khanada and Aleksandr Frantskevich* who were detained as a part of the so-called “international organized crime” case. The regime decided to use the dozens of anarchists’ actions over the past 10 years to create the image of a coordinated organized group engaged in resistance to the regime. Some participants in the case were tortured before being transferred to a detention center.
- Dmitry Rezanovich
- Dmitry Dubovski
- Igor Olinevich
- Sergey Romanov
- These four were detained while crossing the border of Belarus with Ukraine on the night of October 28-29, 2020. Dzmitry Rezanovich emphasized he was saved from torture just because of Siarhei Ramanau sliced his hands with a razor to stop the torment and viciousness.
- They were under a number of articles for setting fire to government officials’ vehicles, the building of the traffic police and the state committee of expertise in the Homeĺ region.
The Belarusian state is trying to increasingly restrict the possibilities to support prisoners even more. Colonies’ and prisons’ administrations try by all means to prevent information spreading about inprisoned comrades and limit their communication with people outside. Relatives are threatened in order to restrict spreading news about prisoners to the public.The state also seeks to worsen prison conditions at every opportunity. The trends in Belarusian repressions we’ve seen in the last few years are the following:
- Punishment with punitive isolation cells and cell-type facilities for prisoners
- Restriction or total ban on correspondence and phone calls for prisoners
- Detention of the relatives of anarchist prisoners
- Additional sentences for allegedly “malicious disobedience to the demands of the colony administration” (Article 411 of the Criminal Code).
- Tightening of the security regime and transfers to high-security prisons
We are also find ourselves operating in a ghost-like movement, which we wrote about in this essay https://abc-belarus.org/en/2023/05/25/anti-repression-work-in-a-ghost-like-movement/
Here’s an excerpt:
… The two biggest groups of anarchists are now distributed between Belarusian prisons and exile. ABC-Belarus, after operating for over 14 years in the country, also had to leave to protect its members and keep up the work. Over time, activists also get disillusioned in the struggle for change in Belarus, because it is not really possible to greatly influence the situation there, and being active in exile feels like fake and sectarian activism for the sake of activism. Moreover, like in most political movement, the “effective life” of an anarchist amounts to 3-5 years. It means, the more time passes in exile, the less comrades we will have around, with almost no influx, since the diasporas are not so numerous and mostly consist of the same tired, traumatised and demoralised migrants.
In light of this, ABC-Belarus remains a very specialised labour-force that seems to be responsible and accountable for organising full-fledged and long-term support of our imprisoned comrades. Needless to say that we are also traumatised and tired, just there is no one we can share this burden with or pass it to, so we will have to carry it. Of course, not everything is so dark, we still can rely on some comrades, we are just concerned about the gloomy trend as the years go by.
* ABC-Belarus withdrew its support for Aliaksandr Frantskevich in 2015 for using violence against comrades, threatening our collective, and his position on the collective property of the movement. After Aliaksandr’s arrest in 2020, ABC declared critical support for him, read more in the statement.