Alyaksandr Klaskouski: “Repressive machine wants to mutilate, break, and rot my son and other people arrested for the Square”

Alyaksandr Klaskouski, a well-known journalist and politologist, has written an open letter to Prosecutor General Ryhor Vasilevich.

The journalist demands to ensure fulfilling the rights of his son Alyaksandr Klaskouski, arrested in the case of December 19.

“My son Alyaksandr Klaskouski has been staying in the KGB jail, the notorious “Amerikanka”, for the third month,” the letter in “Narodnaya Volya” newspaper says. “I have serious grounds to suppose that he is being humiliated and pressed psychologically in violation of the basic norms of the law.”

Klaskouski senior suspects that his son faced even more cruel tortures in the jail than Alyaksei Mikhalevich and Alyaksandr Atroshchankau did. “I imagine how furious some law-enforcement officers were when they saw a former policeman, reserve lieutenant Klaskouski, on the side of demonstrators on December 19. They think he needs exemplary punishment, they want to trample him so that other policemen never think about rebelling against the regime.”

Klaskouski describes how his son was detained: “a special operation was organized to detain an unarmed person. The whole block of flats was alarmed. They were swearing and broke two entry doors. Alyaksandr was knocked down and beaten brutally, perhaps, some ribbons were broken. They said he would have an “easy life” in jail. Later he wrote to his wife he had a strong side stitch. There are doubts if he received proper medical care.”

The journalist notes that only four letters were received from Alyaksadnr during two and a half months, “though, judging from their content, he wrote far more letters”. “I can conclude from the test of the letters that he hasn’t received letters from me. I don’t know if he receives money transfers. My daughter Volha writes to Alyakdansr almost every day, but only a couple of letters have been delivered. I know that many other people send letters of support to him. But my son writes about an information vacuum in his latest letter to his wife,” Klaskouski senior writes.

“Information blockade is also a torture,” he writes. “My son is being psychologically pressed and broken, but the General Prosecutor’s Office proves the conditions there are like in a resort.”

In Klaskouski’s opinion, the main thing is that the arrested “does not have access to proper legal assistance”. “Lawyer Iryna Burak has seen Alyaksandr only two times, both during the interrogations. The last time she saw him was on January 13. Normal legal aid cannot be rendered in such conditions. Iryna Burak has not been given an opportunity to have a face-to-face meeting as the law guarantees. The lawyers in the case of December are told there are no vacant rooms for meetings with their clients. It’s a surprising fact that the lawyers in other, ‘non-political’ cases have rooms to see their clients,” Klaskouski writes.

“it’s rather ridiculous for the powerful agency, which occupies a quarter in Minsk center, including the palace built on the order of Beria’s associate Lavrenty Tsanava, to refer to absence of rooms. I can make only one conclusion: the people arrested in the case of December 19 are intentionally deprived of legal aid,” the author of the letter is convinced.

“Prosecutors must react to publications when the matter is violation of the law. In this case, we deal with trampling on the law,” Klaskouski writes. “When my son and other KGB prisoners, who were arrested for the events on December 19, are given the right to carry on correspondence and an opportunity to see their families and have a face-to-face meeting with their lawyers, only then one will probably believe that prosecution office in our country is not just a sign plate.”

“My grand-grandfather, farmer Vaclav Klaskouski, was tried by a notorious NKVD troika over articles “banditry” and “anti-Soviet propaganda”. Stalin’s thugs sentenced him only for his criticism of collective farms at a village meeting. My grand-grandfather was rehabilitated only after Stalin’s death, in 1960.

It seems that a similar repressive machine wants to mutilate, break, and rot my son and other people arrested for the demonstration on the Square,” the journalist said.