Charniauski: We will create a new community with better protection

The special services have long planned to destroy the Belarusian opposition groups in social networks.

One of the administrators of the opposition groups in VKontakte social network Maksim Charniauski, who is in Poland now, told Radio Svaboda that he found out about the detention of the moderators of the Belarusian groups after the group “We’ve had enough of that Lukashenka” had been seized.

- All the administrators have been deleted, and the content and the participants are being deleted as we speak. I contacted the support of VKontakte at once, but they still haven’t replied. So the community is being destroyed. I also got in touch with one of the moderator’s mother, and she told me that when he was detained she overheard two policemen talking about whole operation, people being detained all over Minsk. I tried to contact our administrator Andrei Tkachou but the KGB had already logged in to his accounts, as far as I understood from conversations. What is my reaction to that? Definitely negative. The special service must have planned a present for Lukashenka’s birthday. They have been trying to destroy us since last summer. And when they were recruiting me and demanded to bring a KGB guy to the community’s administration, of course I refused and they couldn’t destroy us then. Right now this must be tied to the “election”; recently we have supported the boycott campaign.

- So you say it is impossible to restore the communities?

- It depends on the website administration. If they are willing to help, we might get back the access, management and maybe even the content. But it is not likely that they’ll give us the content. And I don’t know if they will help us. This social network has previously cooperated with our special services. Last fall this network deleted the community “Revolution through social network”. They’ve been destroying our community for two hours, and I still haven’t got a reply from the technical support. So it’s up to them if we ever regain the control. We had 37 000 thousand users, it is a lot of people. And even if we cannot get the control back, we will create a new community with a better protection, which they won’t destroy.