Freed Belarus dissident missing after refusing to leave country
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Belarus’ opposition figure Mikola Statkevich (centre, in 2015) has gone missing after getting off a bus that was taking freed Belarusian political prisoners to Lithuania.
PHOTO: AFP
WARSAW – A Belarusian dissident who refused to leave his home country after being released from prison
Mr Mikola Statkevich, who had been in jail for five years, was due to be taken into Lithuania on Sept 11 alongside 51 other freed political prisoners, but got out of the bus just beforehand, the Belarusian media reported.
Security camera footage published by Belarus’ border service showed a man resembling Mr Statkevich sitting in a border zone between the two countries for several hours, before disappearing from view.
The 69-year-old, who ran against Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko in 2010, is a prominent member of the country’s opposition.
“He went towards Belarus, and after that, all information about him was cut off,” Mr Statkevich’s wife, Ms Marina Adamovich, confirmed to AFP by phone.
She said his return to Belarus “was the only possible action for him in this situation”.
“Freedom is subjective, and in this case people were deprived of subjectivity. And I knew that Mikola would not allow this to happen,” she said.
Earlier on Sept 12, Belarus’ exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya said she was “worried about the fate” of Mr Statkevich and that his whereabouts were now “unknown”.
Ms Tikhanovskaya thanked the United States for brokering the release but noted it did not mean “real freedom” for the prisoners and called it a “forced deportation”, speaking at a press conference in Vilnius with some of the other freed prisoners.
A video screengrab is thought to show Belarusian opposition politician Mikola Statkevich after he refused to be taken into Lithuania with other freed prisoners on Sept 11.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Everyone who is released should have “the right to choose, either to stay or to leave. And I spoke about this yesterday with our American partners, and we are pushing on that,” she added.
Some of the prisoners who attended on Sept 12 appeared to have had their heads shaven.
Many were detained during a brutal crackdown on opposition in the wake of Mr Lukashenko’s 2020 re-election and prosecuted on what rights groups have denounced as politically motivated charges.
Rights groups estimate that around 1,000 political prisoners remain behind bars in Belarus. AFP
