Nikolay Svanidze: Lukashenka’s regime dangerous

Russian experts assault recent events in Belarus.

Once again Belarus has appalled the civilized world, which is in favour of moratorium on capital punishment. The world has not recovered from the shock ceased by the brief report of the Belarusian press about execution of the two persons charged with terrorist attack in Minsk subway on April 11, 2011 Dzmitry Kanavalau and Uladzislau Kavalyou. The execution took place right after Alyaksandr Lukashenka denied pardoning the condemned. Dmitry Muratov, a journalist, refuted the story of the Belarusian authorities in his interview to Echo of Moscow:

“Kavalyou, the second executed, whose mother received a notification that the sentence had been enforced, had not blasted, had not assembled explosive devices, had not entered the metro. It has been confirmed by the investigation. In fact, he has been shot for not believing that his friend could have o and blast something, and he was not going to inform on him. He continued to drink with the girl he knew. And he was executed for that,” the editor of Novaya Gazeta is convinced.

The hastiness has also alerted a political writer Leonid Radzikhovsky.

“Personally I am an adherent of the capital punishment against terrorists and some other categories of crimes, so the capital punishment as such does not disturb me at all, I am put on the alert by other things: the hastiness with which it had been done, and I have certain doubts about objectivity of the investigation and the Belarusian court.”

Nikolay Troitsky, a journalist, was ready to interpret the disputable circumstances of the case in favour of the suspects:

“It is not the capital punishment which is under question, but the way how it is carried into execution, as personally I am not an opponent of the death penalty in special extraordinary cases, when a judicial mistake is excluded, as there are such incidents when the culprit is absolutely obvious. And he poses too much of a threat for people to live him alive. As for the recent capital punishment in Belarus, unfortunately, there are too many doubts and questions about whether the executed persons are really guilty.”

Konstantin Remchukov believes it is obvious that Minsk thinks nothing of the opinion of Europe.

“It’s been long since the Belarusian regime ignored the public opinion. And after different sanctions and black lists were introduced by the EU, the Belarusian regime is most likely to pay attention and orientate itself to the EU even less, but when they take a wider view to the world, for instance the US and China and see these countries not just have a death penalty, but people are killed every year in the framework of this type of punishment, they understand that they would not hear any condemnation on the part of such big players as China and the US.”

Leonid Mlechin believes that the behavior of the Belarusian dictator is a dangerous form of populism.

“I am an opponent of the death penalty in principle, no matter how much I am told that the majority of people vote for it, as only one criterion exists for me – failure of justice. Some cases are known when people were sentenced to death, and they were executed, and later it turned out that they had not committed that crime at all, and had no involvement in that. Such cases taken alone are enough to abolish death penalty, and life sentence, especially in our conditions, is an awful punishment, it will be adequate. Carrying out executions in Belarus is in congruence with the president’s vision of what should be done to please the nation; and in fact the majority of the population both in Belarus and in Russia like it to be told: here is the criminal! And he has been executed.”

The actions of the official Minsk look provocative in the eyes of economist Sergey Aleksashenko:

“On the one hand, Europe is building an iron curtain around Belarus, and on the other hand, the Belarusian authorities or the Belarusian president are defiantly demonstrating that they do not want to adhere to the principles and values which are inherent to the European civilization in the beginning of the 21st century.”

Nikolay Svanidze, a historian and TV journalist, believes that the Belarusian regime is a threat for the civilized community:

“The dictatorial regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka is dangerous for citizens of Belarus; courts are subjected to the state leadership, that is why when the death sentence is executed, and it is done so hurriedly, it suggests an idea that the authorities are interested in this exactly hastiness of the execution of the sentence. It is not known why the regime is interested in that. In general, a dictatorial power is always pregnant with tyranny, always results in repressions.”