There's A Place In The Dungeon
- 4.07.2025, 12:53
The Criminal Code will have to be supplemented.
A week ago I wrote about the inevitable punishment for all our executioners. About lustration and how they will start making up biographies for themselves, which will certainly contain stories about their personal resistance, sabotage and sabotage within the system. But there is one more thing besides punishment under the existing criminal code. These are new articles of the Criminal Code, which were not necessary before, because there were no such crimes either. Everything that will be included in the new wording of the Criminal Code, according to the qualifications of human rights activists, is now called incommunicado.
When Sergei Tikhanovsky told about how he had been in solitary confinement for almost five years, I immediately remembered another political prisoner, about whom nothing at all has been known for two and a half years. This is Nikolai Statkevich. He is, of course, not the only political prisoner in isolation without letters or calls, let alone visits. Since February 2023, several political prisoners have found themselves similarly cut off from the world. But if there was at least scant information about others thanks to those who were released from the same colonies, no one has heard of Statkevich. And no one saw her.
From Maria Kolesnikova no letters reached her either, but prisoners of the women's colony in Gomel, when they were released, told about her. She was seen and talked to. And then even a bicycle courier of the regime Roman Protasevich brought Maria's father on a date and shot a video. To Viktor Babariko also came and shot a video: look, he is alive and well, smiling and waving. However, even without Protasevich, prisoners leaving the colony confirmed this.
And no one has heard of Statkevich. And no one has seen him either. Neither his lawyer, nor his relatives, nor the inmates of the same colony. Two and a half years. However, Babariko would probably prefer a guaranteed visit with his relatives rather than Protasevich.
In 2002, hundreds of people were arrested in Turkmenistan for allegedly plotting against Turkmenbashi. The propaganda in Turkmenistan told how a KAMAZ drove towards Niyazov's motorcade on November 25 and fired at it. In general, a shot near Liozno with a Turkmen accent. Mass arrests began in the country, and in January the courts handed down sentences, including life sentences, although the Criminal Code of Turkmenistan does not include life imprisonment as a punishment. So, 60 people out of those hundreds arrested and convicted for plotting against Niyazov (in Turkmenistan they are called "Noyabrists") disappeared in prisons. That is, nobody has seen or heard from them since 2002. 60 people in the twenty-first century in one city were arrested and then went missing. In 2014, there was a brief thaw in Turkmenistan - that's what human rights activists said. And the bodies of "Noyabrists" who died or were killed in prisons were allowed to be released to relatives. But this quickly ended, as did the sentences of many convicts. None of them were ever released.
Human rights activists around the world launched the "Show them alive!" campaign. But it made no difference. There were various rumors about Boris Shikhmuradov, the former foreign minister of Turkmenistan: that he had died, that he had been killed, that he was being held in the basement of the Interior Ministry. For 23 years nothing is known about the man. All these years Turkmenistan's presidents went to the United States on official visits and nobody asked them about the fate of political prisoners. Except for human rights activists, but any dictator and his servants have every right not to answer them.
So when Nikolai Statkevich and other political prisoners, who have been isolated in solitary confinement, PKT or SHIZO for months and years, are released, the question of responsibility of those who put them in these conditions will certainly arise. I recently reread the Criminal Code - there are no articles on the responsibility of the administration of colonies and prisons. There is a vague general article on abuse of authority. And the punishment, in fact, is simple, disproportionate to what the punishers do. But these torture acts should have their own articles. Deprivation of family ties, inadmissibility of a lawyer, forced isolation of a prisoner - all this will have to be introduced into the code, so that the guards cannot escape responsibility. So that they would be held accountable not for abstract excess, but under the whole "bouquet" of articles of the Criminal Code.
Of course, we would not like the Criminal Code to turn into a thick, unbearable volume. But, on the other hand, after the changes in Belarus, so many articles will disappear from this volume that there will be a place for new ones. And there will be a place for new ones, too.
Irina Khalip, especially for Charter97.org.