Uta Zapf: Lukashenka is awfully revengeful

At last eyes of European politicians start to be opened to the last dictatorship in Europe.

Uta Zapf, the head of the working group on Belarus in the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE, as well as the deputy international secretary of the SPD faction in the Bundestag, has published an article about the situation in Belarus at the website of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). It is called “Lukashenka’s Awful Revenge.”

In the article Uta Zapf describes the situation in Belarus after the election and stresses that the presidential candidate Mikalai Statkevich had not been allowed to meet with his lawyer since December; some prisoners have not met with lawyers yet; politically motivated pressure on lawyers of political prisoners is exerted, they are disbarred. She mentions that the presidential candidate Ales Mikhalevich has told about tortures he had come through in the KGB jail, in detail. Now he is in the Czech Republic, where he has asked for a political asylum. She has told once again to readers that the presidential candidate Uladzimir Nyaklyaeu had been beaten up and he was taken by force from the hospital, without offering medical aid to him, and now he is under house arrest. Besides, Uta Zapf mentions the Human Rights Watch report on the human rights situation in Belarus, where the unprecedented scale of crackdown on NGOs, human rights activists, journalists, students and supporters of the presidential candidates is covered.

She called the verdicts of the courts held in Minsk “extremely harsh”. Uta Zapf appeals to render help to the victims of the crackdown and gives great importance to international observation over the events in Belarus.