Night Raid on Valery Levonevsky’s Apartment :: Charter'97 :: News

Overnight on February 15-16, 2003 the law-enforcers raided the Grodno house of the chairman of the Striking committee of entrepreneurs of Belarus Valery Levonevsky. The man has just returned from Minsk, where he reached consensus with all country’s major entrepreneurial structures on implementation of joint actions of protest in February-April 2003, including the People’s March “For Better Life!”

The raid commenced at 10.20p.m. and ended at 00.15a.m. They seized printed production and a copying machine. Levonvesky’s claims to leave the room were paid no heed to by the law-enforcers. Neither did they show him the concomitant search warrant, nor explained the motives behind the move. The seizure protocol has never been shown to him either.

The night visit was carried out with certain acts of violence, applied against Valery’s elder son Dmitry. Dmitry left the house in the evening and got attacked in the street by the law-enforcers, who took away from him the keys from his flat and broke in without any clarifications given. Levonevsky’s house was cordoned off by policemen. Later one of them told him that the search had been sanctioned by the duty officer of the Leninsky district police of Grodno, although night police raids are a forbidden practice in Belarus.

All law-enforcement activities, in Levonevsky’s opinion, were lawless and arbitrary. Valery revealed numerous violations in protocol-filing procedure of the electoral commissions. He is convinced that the root-cause of the unsanctioned night raids lies in the attempt to pressurize Levonevsky, as well as has been provoked by his complaints over the unlawful activities of the voting commissions.