Story

My Story: Arrested in Belarus

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Image by Dimiter Kenarov. Belarus, 2011.

The jail cell is about 10-feet long and 4-feet wide. There is a bunk bed, a cold water faucet, and a squat toilet. The high walls are painted a deep psychedelic green and the floor is a mixture of red boards and bathroom tiles. At the far end of the cell there is a window with two sets of iron bars, an iron grate, and two glass panes. A high wall with razor wire on top is the only view.

Every morning I am awoken by the rattle of keys and bolts, and the loud bang of jail doors. The sound grows louder and louder as the guards move methodically across the cellblock, getting closer to my cell, cell number 11. I quickly get out of bed and put on a pair of pants. When my door finally opens, I’m ready.

I go out and, face turned against the wall, I wait for one of the guards to rummage through my cell. He carries a large hammer, which he uses to check for hollow surfaces in the floor or caches. After a few moments I’m allowed to go back. The cell door is slammed behind me, the keys are turned, and the bolts are slid violently back into place. Gradually, the clatter of iron against iron grows fainter, until the morning inspection is complete and the cellblock is quiet again.

I munch on some leftover bread and cookies, which one of the cops has kindly brought me. I brush my teeth; I use the toilet; I listlessly sit on the bed. The one and only meal for the day—bortsch, bread, one meatball, and a bowl of oatmeal—will arrive in the early afternoon. There is little to do until then.

I have borrowed a book from the library cabinet in the warden’s office, a short story collection by Alexander Mironov, a Soviet writer of adventure stories in a socialist realism vein. The book itself is a sad floppy affair, with half of its pages missing. Probably somebody before me was out of toilet paper. I read for a while about the Soviet Union’s conquest of the Arctic Ocean, about brave captains of icebreakers and sly German spies. When I’m done, I climb on the empty top bunk, close to the barred window, and light up a cigarette. I smoke and stare at the wall with the razor wire.

****

The story of how I ended up in a Belarusian jail for a week is a long one (and will be told in detail in the Fall issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review), but for now it suffices to say that my colleague Jason Motlagh and I were arrested on the outskirts of Mozyr, a town in southern Belarus, on June 29, after I had lost—carelessly, foolishly—my passport the previous evening. We were interrogated for several hours by the local police and KGB agents (as the national security agency is still called), who soon found out that we were foreign journalists on tourist visas. A decision was quickly taken to expel Jason from the country, while, with my passport missing, I was locked up in jail to await “identity verification.”

My temporary Bulgarian passport (I am a Bulgarian citizen) arrived on July 2 and I was deported to the Minsk airport, in a police convoy, two days later. According to my deportation documents, I am banned from visiting Belarus “in the interest of public order” for a period of three years.

Though my detention was nominally lawful, many other journalists working in Belarus (both local and foreign) are having a much harder time. The president of the country Aleksandr Lukashenko, sometimes referred to as the last European dictator, has been dealing mercilessly with the independent and western media. After the mass demonstrations in December 2010, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest what they saw as another rigged election, 25 journalists were arrested by security forces. Free-thinking journalists are routinely harassed in Belarus, their phones tapped, their every move followed by the government. In the Press Freedom Index for 2010, published by Reporters without Borders, Belarus ranked 154th out of 178 countries worldwide. The state still has monopoly over the printing and distribution networks and only two opposition newspapers, Narodnaya Volya and Nasha Niva, are currently on the catalogue for mail subscriptions.

In the meantime, the Internet is slowly eating at the old order. Since June weekly protests, organized through social networks and twitter, are taking place in the streets and squares of Belarus.

It is difficult to build walls against Wi-Fi.