From the BBC:
“A police
officer with a conscience who left Belarus”
Andrei
Ostapovich was a high-flying young police investigator in Belarus when protests
broke out earlier this year, in the wake of the country's disputed presidential
election. He was so horrified by the beating and torture of demonstrators in
custody that he left the country. He's one of hundreds of Belarusian police
officers now in exile in Poland and the Baltic states. Sitting on a Warsaw park
bench in the autumn sunlight, Andrei Ostapovich is lost in thought. He's
oblivious to the couples strolling past, to the laughing teenagers and to the
grandmother and toddler feeding the ducks a few metres away. With his sharp
cheekbones and olive green eyes, the 27-year-old could almost be mistaken for a
guy modelling Italian knitwear or promoting an expensive brand of aftershave.
But Andrei is a policeman on the run. Strictly speaking, Andrei is not running
any more - he feels relatively safe in Poland. But when he decided to quit his
job as a high-flying detective in the Belarusian capital, Minsk this summer, he
realised he would have to leave the country straight away or risk arrest. "I've
been in police uniform for the past 10 years," he says. "But after
the elections in August, I thought I was no longer safe wearing it because of
the way people now feel about the police. My uniform made me ashamed"
Brought up in
the Grodno region, near the Polish border, Andrei's bravery and quick wittedness
was first spotted when, aged 15, he saved a younger boy from drowning in a
lake. Local firemen and paramedics were so impressed by the rescue that they
suggested he might like a job with them after he left school. But Andrei had
other plans. After five years at an academy attached to the Ministry of
Internal Affairs, where he studied law and forensics, he qualified as an
investigator. He began with probes into medical negligence and just three
months after graduation he made a name for himself by catching a notorious
paedophile. He soon moved on to some of the country's most complex murder
cases. "The job was really exciting," he tells me, sucking hard on a
cigarette. "There were interesting cases in which the suspects proved
elusive and it was such a thrill when you managed to outsmart them - like
winning a game of chess." He says there was little political interference
in his work as a senior investigator. But as elections approached he was
troubled by the arrest of presidential candidates - a banker, Viktor Babaryko
and blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky - on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Official
results after the 9 August poll gave Alexander Lukashenko a landslide victory
and a sixth term in office. But many both inside and outside Belarus were
certain that the voting had been rigged. People took to the streets in
unprecedented numbers demanding the resignation of the former collective farm
boss who has ruled the country for the last 26 years. Andrei went to the
rallies after work to see what was going on. He found himself running for cover
as police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades into the crowd. What he saw
with his own eyes - and in videos posted online - sickened him. So although he
loved his job, he wrote a five-page letter of resignation, detailing all the
abuses he'd witnessed, stating that the riot police "were the only people
who provoked violence" and claiming that they had executed "criminal
orders". Fully aware that he might face arrest, he fled across the border
to Russia.
Very soon the
Russian security services, the FSB, showed up at his hotel in the city of
Pskov. "They put handcuffs on me and a ski mask covered with black
cloth," says Andrei. "Then they attached a dumbbell to the handcuffs
- it was so heavy, more than 30kg of metal. I thought they might throw me in
the lake with this dead weight, and I wouldn't be able to swim. When you can't
see anything, you have no idea what's going on." The FSB officers, who did
not introduce themselves, drove for four hours to the Belarusian border. Then
they stopped, took Andrei out of the car, and removed his mask and handcuffs. "The
FSB tried to act like they were not involved in my arrest," he says.
"They gave me back my things and told me to walk along the road. I saw
some [Belarusian] KGB agents approaching so I didn't hang about, I ran into the
forest," says Andrei. "They chased me but they couldn't keep up, so I
managed to escape." Dressed in no more than his jeans, trainers and a
T-shirt, Andrei sought refuge among thick forests of pine and birch, lakes and
treacherous marshes. He immediately threw away his three mobile phones, to
avoid being traced. He had no food apart from some chocolate bars and a bottle
of water. Once he slipped into a swamp up to his waist and couldn't move his
legs. Fortunately he was able to reach some thick reeds, but it took all his
strength to haul himself out. Then there was a close encounter with a wild boar
- "a huge beast with tusks", he says. "I managed to dazzle it
with my torch and it ran off but it was very scary being alone at night in the
forest." After 10 days of wandering in circles and getting hopelessly
lost, Andrei eventually reached Poland, where he applied for asylum.
According to
Evgeny Yushkevich, a former senior Belarusian police investigator now in
Lithuania, at least 350 men and women from the police and other law enforcement
bodies have resigned from their jobs. Together with activists who helped supply
hospitals with food and protective equipment when Covid first struck last
spring, he launched a scheme to help people in Andrei's situation. Bysol, which
stands for Belarusian Solidarity, offers financial and legal support for police
and other state employees who left their posts in protest against state
sponsored violence and election fraud. Mikita Mikado, who founded a software
company in Minsk called Panda Doc and later moved to Silicon Valley, came up
with a similar initiative. His project, ProtectBelarus.org, offers retraining
in the tech industry for Belarusian police officers who refused orders to
attack protesters. "I appeal to Belarusian security officials," the
tech entrepreneur wrote on his Instagram account, "if you want to be on
the side of good, but finances do not allow, write — I will help." Soon
afterwards, the site said it had received 594 applications from police
officers. Apart from offering ex-cops pathways to new careers, Mikado said he
would help to pay off loans. Belarusian police are effectively "indentured
employees" because they are paid upfront at the beginning of their
contract, so when they break it they are immediately in debt to the state. Andrei,
however, who repaid the state without Mikado's help, doesn't plan on retraining
because he wants to go home as soon as possible. He's in contact with the
exiled opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya - the woman many Belarusians
now consider their legitimate president - and hopes one day to help her end a
culture of violence in Belarusian law enforcement. The response to the protests
was just the most extreme example of a tendency to violence that had always
existed, he says. "I think it's a kind of herd instinct," he says.
"In police departments there are sinks used to wash away blood - the floor
can get soaked with blood. So they call the place near the sink the Wailing
Wall. I don't know if they think all this is funny or not, but after doing
horrible things to people they'd sit with their mates and chat and laugh… it
looked like pure sadism to me. I know they enjoyed it, the excitement and the
adrenaline." He adds that many police and special forces officers have
signed papers which absolve them of responsibility for their actions, as they
are supposedly protecting the state at a time of crisis. According to human
rights groups, to date, more than 19,000 people have been arrested, thousands
have been beaten and some horrifically tortured in police stations and
detention centres.
I asked the
Belarusian Interior Ministry's spokeswoman Olga Chemodanova to comment on these
numbers and the allegations of mistreatment. She wrote back to say she was not
yet in a position to comment. Some in the opposition believe that one way to
disempower the security services is to expose and shame them individually,
either by physically pulling the balaclavas from their faces - or, more
controversially, by uploading on social media any photographs they can get hold
of. Names, addresses and phone numbers are often published too. "One of
the best tactics against the police and Omon is not open warfare, fighting on
the streets," says Stepan Svetlov, the 22-year-old founder of a channel on
the social messaging app, Telegram, that has helped to co-ordinate the
Belarusian protests. "Instead we are fighting an information war. We have
to keep up the psychological pressure on them and on their families because it
does have an effect." Svetlov's channel is called Nexta, meaning
"someone", and sitting in his small Warsaw office he tells me that it
gets the data about these officers in leaks from whistleblowers or
"cyber-partisans" inside government ministries.
Andrei
Ostapovich But Andrei Ostapovich argues that attempts to
publicly shame police officers could increase their determination to crush the
protests with violence. "They know they are tied to this current
government and if it gets changed, they would end up in court," he says.
"When citizens start insulting the riot police, calling them 'inhuman and
fascists', they are under constant negative pressure and they become even more
aggressive." President Lukashenko appears to agree. Although he has hinted
in the last few days that he could step down, he recently warned some Russian
journalists that if he fell, the country would fall with him, including those
who protect him. "Guys in the Omon, the riot police and many others, like
that guard sitting over there", he said pointing to his security guard.
"Why should they be blamed? And yet they would be slaughtered - torn to
pieces - if I'm forced out." Hanna Kostseva was in court when her two
brothers, Stanislaw and Ilya, aged 19 and 21, were sentenced to death for
murder. She and her mother will never find out when they were shot, or where
they were buried.
^ It is through
people like Andrei Ostapovich that we know Lukashenko’s Dictatorship is at an
end. Ostapovich could have stayed in Belarus and enjoyed a good life and yet he
fled everything he knew for freedom. The real heroes of Belarus are those that
fled to continue the fight from outside and those that stayed and continue the
fight from within. ^
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