Doctor from Vitebsk: The authorities are weak and inadequate

A doctor from Vitebsk addresses the head of the Vitebsk region executive committee with a video appeal.

As the charter97.org had previously reporter, recently the pediatrician Igar Postnou was fired from a Vitebsk clinic for publicly criticizing the head of the Vitebsk region Aliaksandr Kasinets. He said about squandering the budget resources and decline of public health care in the Vitebsk region, he publicly focused attention on the unfinished surgical building of the oncological hospital, delayed renovation of the infectious diseases hospital, temporary closedown of the Afghan center.

On 20 December the fired doctor recorded a video appeal ad posted it on youtube.

“I am Pastnou Igar Aliakseevich, a pediatrician from Vitebsk, whom, not without the participation of our General Governor, is being thrown out to the street today in the middle of winter for the reason that on many issues I do not agree with the policy carried out by our General Governor, Aliaksandr Mikalaevich Kasinets.

Many people are asking me today: Igar, why do you need that? Why do you need to torture your mother who is worried about you? Why do you need to lose your job, probably, the social status and may be the life itself? So, first of all I would like to respond that I am doing this in order to prove that it is possible to fight for your rights by legal means.

Secondly, I want to show how deprived of our rights we, medical workers, are. Not only do we earn little, but each of us may be treated like a dog, be dealt shortly without any objections. And thirdly, to show to what extent unsubstantiated are their words that they care about children, about patients, about people’s lives.

More than fifty parents have collected signatures today and sent them to the president’s aide demanding for me to be restored at work, for the contract to be prolonged with me and I got my former position. First of all I want to address the General Governor Aliaksandr Kasinets.

Esteemed General Governor, I think, it is improper to treat a person in that way only for the reason that he for the first doctor who refused to send children to the conditions of a casemate that are there in the infectious diseases hospital, where it would be hard to stay even for a healthy person. He was the first one to say the second hospital is not suited for being a medical institution, which people called a death valley for a reason. I was the first one to say that the policy of our General Governor is a soap bubble existing at the expense of loans, which would soon burst and everyone would see what it stood on – on tears, shortage of money or impossibility of a proper renovation of the infectious diseases hospital.

I, for example, have now tears in my eyes, when I see that we have wasted the summer and now, when we are facing the frosts of minus twenty, the finishing works still continue although it can be seen that everything falls apart right away. A cannot look at that, cannot look how money is being buried in the ground. The General Governor Kasinets when still being a rector (and I am responsible for my words) dealt shortly with six professors who had written an open letter against his methods of management. One of the professors had a heart attack; the others lost their jobs and positions.

My case is to the first one that is why I want to say: this will not happen. People, parents, children have all supported me. The methods of the authorities are not very inadequate and coward. That is why I want to say that our authorities are, unfortunately, very weak today.

They are weak in the way that there is only one person who works, only one person who thinks. The officials in the regions have lost the ability to think independently, that is why they take such absolutely inadequate actions.

Today I was forbidden to make rounds in the districts because they are afraid that I will agitate there for parents’ protests against such actions. But the parents are collecting signatures themselves, practically without my participation; they are filled with indignation by such behavior of the authorities. Now everyone has seen how weak our authorities are and how primitive their actions are.