Belarus journalist tells of ordeal at the hands of tyrannical elite

Summary of story from the Telegraph, June 13, 2011

Iryna Khalip, a journalist and wife of Andrei Sannikov, the jailed opposition leader of Belarus, dreams of the day when her life no longer reads like something out of George Orwell’s 1984.

She always knew that Belarus’s neo-Soviet regime was vicious. But she had not expected it to target her family for destruction in even her worst nightmares.

It is true that Khalip, 43, had written a series of hard-hitting articles for a Russian newspaper pouring scorn on Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s neo-Stalinist dictatorial president, who has held power since 1994.

It is also true that Sannikov resigned from his post as deputy foreign minister to help found a pro-democracy rights group, and then had the nerve to challenge Lukashenko in last December’s presidential election.

Sannikov was recently jailed for five years after being forced to falsely say that he had organised a violent protest against the regime.

The Belarus KGB secret police told her husband that Khalip and their young son, Daniil, four, would be killed if he did not confess to his alleged crimes.

She was then given a two-year suspended sentence, ostensibly for disrupting public order by taking part in an opposition protest. Because she is not allowed to leave Minsk, she remains at the regime’s mercy.

“I will be tried again in two years’ time and there is a 50-50 chance that they will send me to jail. They have set things up so that this will always be hanging over me, so that I cannot forget.”

When Khalip and her husband took to the streets last December with thousands of others to protest against yet another rigged election, trouble flared.

Unidentified men she believes were regime provocateurs attacked the main government building in Minsk, giving the riot police the perfect pretext to pounce and Lukashenko the ammunition he needed to claim the opposition was mounting a coup.

It was, she said, a set-up. The building was barricaded from the inside and was filled with riot police wearing body armour.

“It was all planned in advance,” she said. As she watched in horror, her husband was brutally assaulted. With the help of friends, she got him into a car and set off for the hospital.

On route, she began giving an interview to a Russian radio station, but did not get very far. A phalanx of police cars boxed them in like something out of a Hollywood film and dragged the couple out.

“The radio station told me to stay on the line for as long as I could and I did, but a policemen punched me in the face when I refused to give up my phone.”

The court has allowed her to see her husband twice in the last month and they are now able to exchange letters.

“I am not my old self and have been operating on autopilot,” she conceded.

Amid signs that the regime was beginning to unravel, she said she was optimistic. The national currency has been devalued by almost 50 per cent, there has been a run on certain goods. Popular discontent was growing, she said.

“The balance of power has shifted. The authorities are more afraid of the people than the other way round.”