Valery Schukin: “Regime Getting Ready For Night of Long Knives” :: Charter'97 :: News

“On the eve of the presidential elections the authorities would try to do everything possible to suppress the remnants of freedom in the country. The official warnings of the Prosecutor’s office to journalists, battery of the Zubrs, searches in the apartments of oppositional youth in Vitsebsk prove that. During the searches policemen are interested not by explosives, but by contacts of the oppositionists. It is obvious that the authorities are getting ready for “The Night of the Long Knives” before the elections, when ‘oppositionally-minded’ people are to be interned, so that they would not be able to come to the square, so that we would not have our “majdan”. But it is useless, it is impossible to intimidate freethinking people,” said the well-known human rights activist and journalist, a member of the Council of Civil Initiatives “Free Belarus” Valery Schukin, commenting on the issuing of the official warning to the special correspondent of the Russian “Novaya Gazeta” in Belarus, Iryna Khalip, issued by the Prosecutor’s office of Belarus.

It is said in the warning that “the article “Time to throw away the rake” with the question “Will a revolution take place in Belarus?” in the “Novaya Gazeta” of August 1-3, 2005 has been studied in the exercise of supervisory powers. It has been established that it has evidence of calls for destabilization of public order and change of the constitutional system of Belarus by extrajudicial measures”.

The prosecutor of the department on monitoring of fulfilment of the constitutional rights of citizens of the Prosecutor’s office of Belarus, Svyataslau Harelik, warned Iryna Khalip, that “in case her appearance in mass media with the same calls would be repeated”, the actions of the journalist would be considered as a call for violent overthrow of state regime, and according to the Criminal Code of Belarus, the punishment for that is up to 5 years of imprisonment.

As we have informed, the journalist has been summoned to the Republican prosecutor’s office many times, and has been demanded explanations for her critical articles in the “Novaya Gazeta”.

In 2002 a criminal action has been brought up against Iryna Khalip for her article “Afghani Greyhounds” published in the supplement “Dlia sluzhebnogo polzovaniya” (“Restricted”) of the newspaper “Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta” (BDG). She was charged with libelling of honour and dignity of Viktar Shejman, previously Prosecutor General, and now the head of the Presidential Administration.