Heartbreak in Belarus: Iryna Khalip Continues Fighting for Husband's Freedom
Jailed Belarus presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov told his wife Iryna Khalip that he is seeking a pardon from the country’s authoritarian leader because he fears for his life.
“They could kill me at any moment,” he told Khalip – IWMF’s
Courage in Journalism Award winner – when she was finally allowed to visit him this week
Khalip, 44, an investigative reporter for Novaya Gazeta, told reporters in Minsk about her two-hour visit at the penal colony Vitsba-3, where her husband has been in isolation for three months. Sannikov’s mother accompanied her. Belarus officials had refused to allow Khalip or lawyers to visit Sannikov for three months.
“I have to fight for the liberation of my husband and other political prisoners,” she told the IWMF. “I know exactly how the KGB tries to break people and it’s really torture.”
It’s been a heartbreaking year for Khalip and Sannikov, an opposition presidential candidate held in isolation in a penal colony for protesting the widely criticized election in December 2010. He and Khalip were arrested for organizing and inciting “riots,” and Belarus officials threatened to take custody of Danila.
For weeks Khalip was jailed, then held under house arrest with KGB guards around the clock watching her in their Minsk apartment. She was given a two-year suspended sentence, and she remains under tight government scrutiny with 10 p.m. curfews and mandatory weekly visits to the police station.
Their 4-year-old son recently discovered that his father was in prison, after months of asking when he would return home. “One day he was playing with the buttons clicked on the computer and there was a photo of Andrei behind bars on Charter 97 website,” Khalip told the IWMF. “He said, ‘Momma, now I know our Daddy is in prison. I guess that’s why he didn’t come back home.’ ”
“I had to explain to Danila that in our country heroes can be in prisons, while criminals can be in power,” Khalip said. “He is like a child of war after World War II, when little boys thought like adults and grew up early.”
remains determined to tell the world about corruption in Belarus
Thirteen months after Sannikov and countless others were jailed in what has been called “the North Korea of Europe,” President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s regime has eliminated press freedom, threatened to fine anyone accessing foreign websites and allegedly the KGB launched a cyber attack on popular opposition website Charter 97. Sannikov was one of the co-founders of the civil initiative Charter 97 and the rebuilt website today pictures him under the label “our president.”
In 2009, when the International Women’s Media Foundation gave her the
Courage in Journalism Award, Khalip wondered aloud how Belarus had become a dictatorship in “There was no putsch, no junta, no sudden coup d’etat…We started to gradually lose our freedom. Was it when my paper was shut down? Or when my colleagues started to get arrested for reporting the news? Or, was it perhaps when the police searched my house after I had published a piece on corruption? Was it when my friends – opponents to Lukashenka – started to disappear one by one?”
Her husband Sannikov, former deputy foreign minister of Belarus, was beaten and jailed in 2006 after the previous questionable presidential election. He dared to run against Lukashenka in December 2011, and his supporters believe he would have won the election. Instead, he was once again beaten and jailed for five years – the exact length of Lukashenka’s term in office.
“We are not in fear – we do believe that Belarus will be free and democratic very soon,” Khalip e-mailed IWMF Executive Director Liza Gross just two days before the Dec. 19, 2010 disastrous presidential election.
Now that optimism has vanished. Even though President Obama finally imposed sanctions on the Belarus government in early January, critics complain that the European Union has yet to seriously clamp down on the Stalinist country. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who engineered a deal to take over a major Belarus gas pipeline firm, has rushed to loan crisis-struck Belarus billions. Twenty percent of that oil is piped to Europe, which has largely remained silent over the repression in Belarus.
The battered Belarus economy has led thousands to flee to Lithuania and Russia, which have welcomed them. “Maybe the economic problems will press people to open their minds about the bloody regime,” Khalip said. “The prices of sausage and cheese and human rights have a close relationship here.”
Khalip has long said, “dictatorships don’t like journalists – they either destroy them or buy them out.” More than eight years ago the criminal code of Belarus was rewritten to prevent reporters from writing anything negative about the President, and the independent press was destroyed.