19 March 2024, Tuesday, 5:55
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The Yellow Patches Society

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The Yellow Patches Society
Iryna Khalip

There is something that the mothers of the convicts under Article 328 of the Criminal Code achieved – the yellow patches were replaced with the green ones.

A district public prosecutor office’s agent visited the all-school PTA meeting to give the parents a lecture about the criminality among the minors. She said that most minors who are sent to jail go there under Article 328, which is, illegal distribution of drugs. She recalled the Partyzanski district court of Minsk having sentenced a minor to 9 years of imprisonment recently. She warned: parents, be aware that the practice of hardening the punishment is going on – one can get large terms for the banal use of drugs.

And then I recalled how, several days before that, I met with the mothers whose children had already been convicted under Article 328, with huge prison terms. Those who had been sentenced before Lukashenka demanded to create such conditions for the drugs convicts so that they would “beg for death”, managed to get 9-10 years. All those who came afterwards – 12-15. The mother of one of them, signing the permit for an after-sentence meeting at the judge’s office, asked him “How could this happen?” The judge’s cynical response was “We have run out of the tickets to 10s”. This was the case of a judge telling the truth.

You have probably heard of these haunting-thresholds women – they have been trying to register their own association called “Mothers’ Movement 328” for a long time. They keep on getting denied although their charter and every other document necessary for obtaining the state registration is in order. Do you know the reason for the repeated denial? Listen up: “328 is a number of the article of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, which provides for criminal responsibility for the illegal turnover of drug substances. In connection with that, a simple correlation of the word combination “mothers’ movement” and the number 328 leads to a natural question: how does a mothers’ movement comply with the illegal turnover of drugs?” This seems a masterpiece of the “kolkhoz” casuistry.

The mothers have collected so many of such masterpieces, signed by the officials, that, if they handed them in as waste paper back in the Soviet times, they would have got the complete set of works of Alexandre Dumas in return. Most of them came from the Interior Ministry’s Department of Corrections. The mothers have special relations with this Department: if they sort of have a choice when it comes to writing to the “chamber of another convocation”, like, to write or “not-to-write-sick-of-them” mode, then they are forced to write, call and come to the Department of Corrections as this organization have full power over their sons. So, they write, call and come – I mean, what are the options? They even did achieve something – the yellow patches were replaced with the green ones.

When Lukashenka demanded to make the drugs convicts “beg for death”, local initiatives started emerging fast and furious. It became known that the Department of corrections ordered to manufacture yellow patches for all the convicts under Article 328, so that “a 328 con” would be easily distinguished in the prison crowd. It was then the mothers went to see Head of the DoC Siarhei Daroshka. They reminded him there had already been yellow patches in history. Although those patches were in the form of a hexagram star, but one can’t help building associations. Daroshka said then, right, mommies, you are right, thank you for the vigilance, we’ll correct it. So, they started sewing green patches instead of the yellow ones. Green seems such a neutral, optimistic colour. Still, they refused to abolish the very idea of patches. Lukashenka ordered to make the life of 328 convicts unbearable, so we will do it. To achieve this, the article bearer should be distinguished from the others. Besides, they will wear the prison uniform of another colour soon – everyone will be in black, and they will be in blue. Just in case a prison guard has poor eye-sight, he could miss a patch and fail to send a man to the penal cell so that he would “beg for death”. He will definitely distinguish the colour though, if he is not an achromat.

When the mothers of the 328 movement collected kilograms of casuistic formal replies from the DoC, they decided to make an appointment at the Minister of Internal Affairs Ihar Shunevich’s office . They called the Interior Ministry. They were told, of course, we will appoint you, but your sons will have to give you a PoA to represent their interests. I suppose there is no need to explain how hard it is to go round the penal facilities and collect all the necessary PoAs, and to wait till the administration agrees to verify all those documents. Still, the ladies did it. Although, they had no idea that a surprise was expecting them.

They were told in the Interior Ministry: “You have the PoAs? Excellent. However, the Minister will not meet with you anyway. The good news is one of his deputies can talk to you, under one condition: all the written replies from the Department of Corrections should be signed by its head Siarhei Daroshka.” (Let me explain – he never signs anything by himself. All the official papers come signed by his deputy Uladzislau Mandryk). So, the ladies said: how come, you do know that Mandryk signs everything. And that’s what they heard in response: “Why do we need this Mandryk? He is a nobody and his name means nothing, if you don’t have a signature of the head of the DoC, you will have no contacts with the board of the Interior Ministry. We will not let you go to top officials’ offices with waste papers signed by some petty clerks!”

The district public prosecutor office’s agent at that PTA meeting was right about the practice of hardening the punishment. However, what she didn’t mention was the fact that it is no longer obligatory to collect evidence under Article 328. Every dose in a pocket automatically means “with an aim of distribution”. No investigatory measures, no witnesses, no purchase-sale, no nothing in a case. The accusation exists only on paper, but another 16-year-old convict goes to a penal facility for 10 years. Do you have an idea what he would be like when he comes out? That’s it.

Besides, even if a real drug-dealer is sent to prison and gets his term – that’s where it all should end. A penal colony, a reinforced regime, an industry zone, four parcels a year etc. But patches on a convict’s robe setting differences under an article of the Criminal Code – this is Fascism, the same as the demand to make their life unbearable, coming from a high rostrum. However, we are all wearing yellow patches, right? This is a characteristic feature of the people who live in a dictatorship: everyone should be patched and numbered. It’s just the patches are coloured with invisible sympathetic ink, so no one notices anything at the first sight, and a few visiting foreigners admire the beauty of the Belarusian women, paying no attention to their sleeves.

Of course, drug dealers deserve severe punishment. However, when the state allowed legal selling of spice and willingly got the whole generation “hooked” on this garbage, as well as on cheap booze, for five years, suddenly decides to struggle with the illegal turnover of drugs by sending drug addicts to jail – it’s the state which should be accused in the first place. The state which encouraged the “junk” is guilty of all those murders, suicides, psychoses, as it prefers murders and psychoses over protests. Lukashenka’s speech wasn’t about starting the struggle with drug dealing, but about its transferring under the state’s crime-sponsored cover. Because, if it was struggle, the state would have started a large-scale program of treatment and rehabilitation first of all. However, there is no such program in Belarus. No program for drug addicts at all. Meanwhile, the scorns over those people in prisons and over their families at freedom do exist.

So, these miserable mothers are trying to get to the top officials’ offices in vain. Because, there are the people who should have been at their sons’ place and serve some 10-15 years in prison, sitting in those offices. They are the criminally-sponsored “cover”, which is desperate for the new convicts with big terms for the imitation of struggle with drug dealing and cleaning the market. More convicts mean easier trade and control. No “joint” will out the window.

Iryna Khalip, specially for charter97.org

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