"I Hope My Impertinent Tone Will Make You Angry"

• 14.02.2021, 14:56

Writer Sasha Filipenka has appealed to the head of the Red Cross to help stop torture in Belarus.

Belarusian writer Sasha Filipenka appealed to the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, with a request to help stop torture in Belarus. The letter was published by Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a major Swiss German-language newspaper.

The Village cites the full text of the appeal:

Dear Mr. President!

During your visit to Russia, you expressed a desire to meet with me to discuss my book "The Red Cross," which has been recommended to you by the President of Switzerland. As you said, you liked the book very much. You have postponed our meeting several times, explaining that you would first like to meet Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Mishustin, whose names and positions probably should have made a great impression on me - but they didn't.

Forgive me, but our meeting did not make a positive impression on me either. Back in the autumn, I told you straight away that I was not at all interested in holding lengthy dialogues about literature, but that I was very interested to talk about the situation in Belarus and, especially, about the work of the International Red Cross in my home country. But, as it seemed to me, this conversation is not of much interest to you. I really hope I'm wrong about that, and in the very near future you will demonstrate a keen interest in overcoming the humanitarian disaster which began in Belarus last year and continue to this day.

I asked you to inspect Belarusian prisons in which women sleep on concrete floors and metal nets without mattresses, in which they put bread under their heads instead of pillows, the toilets are holes in the floors which are not even curtained, and the guards do not allow toothbrushes and sanitary towels into the cells. Then, back there in the fall, you responded that the ICRC does not have such a mandate.

Anticipating that answer, I reminded you of the Brazilian favelas, where the ICRC is much more active. As I did then at our lunch in Moscow, I bindingly state that the Brazilian favelas are resorts with high security and guarded parking compared to today's "prison Minsk".

One of the main arguments you used to explain your inability to intervene in the Belarusian events is the position of neutrality that the International Red Cross has supposedly adopted. I allow myself to use the word "supposedly" because in the case of Belarus, the organization you head does not actually observe any neutrality. The post of the chairman of the Presidium of the Belarusian Red Cross is held by Dmitry Pinevich, Minister of Health of the Republic of Belarus. That is, the head of the public organization is an official appointed by and directly subordinate to dictator Lukashenka! (He himself, by the way, has appointed himself President of the Belarusian Olympic Committee - I hope you, a citizen of the country with long-standing democratic traditions, will find this fact at least funny).

And under Pinevich, who is allegedly responsible for the neutrality of the International Red Cross, Belarus has launched an unprecedented attack on medical workers. Several dozens of medical workers, including heads of major medical centers and universities, have been dismissed for their civic position. Well-known oncologist Aliaksandr Minich has been sentenced to 13 days of arrest for taking part in a peaceful protest demonstration, despite the fact that he is the leading specialist of his hospital. Artsiom Sarokin, the doctor who reported the details of the diagnosis of murdered artist Raman Bandarenka, is in jail and is soon to face trial for allegedly disclosing medical secrets. The relatives of the deceased have no claims against Sarokin, yet the authorities are taking revenge on him for denying the lies of the murderers covered up by the state. Aliaksandr Mrochek, director of the Scientific Center of Cardiology, has been fired - he did not oppose his subordinates when they were coming out to protest. Led by Mrochek, the center was performing heart transplant surgeries that were unique for the country. Mrochek was receiving threats, and his summer house has been burned down. Andrei Vitushka, a resuscitator, was detained because he was trying to find his underage (!) son in the police department. I would not have enough space in my article for all of those examples!

Lots of doctors don't get their contracts renewed for posts on social networks. During the tragic days of August, armed rapists with no identification signs, apparently with the tacit consent of the Ministry of Health, used ambulances to move around the city. They took advantage of the fact that columns of protesting citizens were giving way to cars with a red cross on them - is there any need for a more obvious metaphor about the regime's perfidy and inhumane nature?

More than two hundred doctors and nurses were detained during peaceful protests. Some of them were beaten, lots of them fined and arrested for up to 45 days. Under neutrality-observing Mr. Pinevich, the doctors are fleeing from Belarus - about 200 Belarusian doctors have already moved to work in neighboring Poland, after which dictator Lukashenka has decided to close the borders and warned that he will not let the gone doctors back into the country. Once again he violates the constitution - no one has the right to prohibit a citizen of the Republic of Belarus to return to his own country.

We know that in addition to thousands of pages of beautiful and respectable deeds, there are also sad chapters in the history of the Red Cross. During the Red Cross inspections of Nazi concentration camps, surprisingly neither gas chambers nor operating rooms for human experimentation were noticed by the Red Cross officers. However, this can be explained - the ICRC staff was much smaller back then than it is now.

I don't mention the camps just for the sake of flashy comparisons or hurtful rebuke. The ICRC is cooperating with the criminal regime which is building a concentration camp for political prisoners in the center of Europe in 2020. By direct order of the president, the most active regime fighters will be put there. This would be, as the current deputy interior minister put it, for as long as "the dust not settled."

Don't you think, Mr. President, that we live in a time when concentration camps can no longer be ignored? The ICRC, one of the most influential humanitarian organizations in the world, must finally stop communicating and cooperating with dishonest politicians and hear the voices of common people who are crying for help.

I am not asking you to do more than you can - I am asking you to do only what you should do, only what the ICRC exists for in the civilized world for. I firmly believe that it is the duty of the International Red Cross to visit, as soon as possible, the overcrowded Belarusian prisons, where civilians are kept in the solitary confinement cells for weeks, where there is no hot water and hygiene products, where arrested people are subjected to torture and psychological and physical pressure.

The ICRC is obliged to demand an end to the practice of kidnapping and beating of citizens by people without identifying signs, to demand an end to torture - this is a direct violation of international conventions signed by Belarus.

When you see on the website of the ICRC Belarusian branch that its last entry is dated the beginning of August, you blush for this respectable organization. A lot has happened since then, hasn't it? Although, there is also an entry on the Facebook page of the Belarusian ICRC that its employees have delivered water to the detention facilities. I am sure that the International Red Cross certainly can and MUST do much more. The International Red Cross is obliged to provide help, not to pretend that it is providing it, otherwise the useless Red Cross office in Belarus should be closed for its uselessness.

Dear Mr. President, together with you, we see that if you close your eyes to the atrocities of the security forces in one country, their crimes are immediately repeated in the neighboring one. Already now, we keeping track of the torture and violence against detained peaceful protesters in Russia. I'm sure I don't need to explain to you that if we all continue to do nothing, or if we just keep comforting ourselves with the appearance of fighting injustice, this cancer will spread and will certainly appear in some European country as well. Hungary, for example, in my personal opinion, is already quite ready for this.

Mr. President, I do hope that the defiant and impertinent tone of this letter will make you angry. However, I also hope that you, being a man of wisdom, will suppress the indignation and lay bare my wrongness with your deeds. I really hope that you will hear me, for I speak not with my own voice, but with the voices of many Belarusians who need your help in prisons and in the streets of their cities and towns.

When, together with you, we have ensured that there are no more political prisoners in the heart of Europe, when weapons are no longer used against civilians, when people in Belarus are no longer kidnapped, killed and tortured, I suggest that we get back to the literary topics.