Alyaksandr Kazulin: «This amnesty is called a commercial one»

During the meeting with his family Alyaksandr Kazulin passed his letters with his view of the events in the country. Bring to your notice thoughts of former presidential candidate and present prisoner of the colony “Vitba-3” on the forthcoming amnesty.

As prisoners say, Lukashenka promised before election: “Vote for me and I will amnesty all prisoners.” That’s why they have been waiting for a big “golden” amnesty. Belarus (even according to official statistics) has the biggest amount of prisoners in the world. The real situation is that there are even more prisoners, I judge it by the fact that prisons, remand prisons, colonies are overcrowded. There are remand prisons and colonies where people have to sleep by turn, because there’s no enough space. This information can hardly be hidden, as everything is known in prisons via well-organised communication system (“wireless” post, communication between colonies).

Our criminal laws are very cruel, terms of imprisonment are huge – an average term is 7 years. If there are more than 200 thousands of crimes annually, one can imagine, how many people are in prisons.

Having spent 20 months here, I can say that our legal system works like a band tire. A considerable part of people were sentenced on fabricated cases. That’s why, according to official statistics, 1% of the population trust courts, 4% - militia and 6% - KGB.

This amnesty has been waited for a long time. All prisoners linked amnesty with Lukashenka’s personality. When I was given a project of amnesty and read it to the prisoners, the majority didn’t believe it could be so.

If take the amnesty as an accomplished fact, I have a feeling, it was prepared and approved by a person, guided only by emotions.

There is a great amount of goofs in the law. It’s the first time in the history of the Soviet Union and independent Belarus when such paragraph as withdrawal of one year of imprisonment is absent in the law. It’s was the only light at the end of a tunnel for many prisoners, who have huge terms. With adoption of this amnesty, the prison administration will lose the means of control of prisoners (prisoners have a motivation to behave in proper way to be amnestied).

If earlier amnesty was valid within 6 months, and since 2002 it has had no validity period at all, according to this amnesty the term of serving 1/3 of imprisonment is counted from the day of entering the law into force.

If, for example, 1/3 of a term will begin in 2 days or a week after the law has come into force, a prisoner won’t be included into amnesty. But it’s valid within 6 months: for the prisoners to pay their damage. That’s why this amnesty is called a commercial one. Its objective is getting money from prisoners. So, only 3-4% of total amount of prisoners will be released.

This amnesty doesn’t deal with humanism or mercy. Not to speak of the fact that Lukashenka has deceived all people. How many ruined families and destinies are there! The Belarusian prisons don’t reform people, but cripple them.