How Internet users caused a stir among Minsk policemen (Photo)

Payment is given to these idlers and petrol is bought for prison vans and police buses from the state budget.

The secret of success for a reporter is to be in the right place at the right time. I saw an invitation from a person named Pyotr Dubnyak (not a real name I suppose) on VKontakte social networking site. The invitation was to take part in a protest action. I went to the central railway station at the appointed time. According to the plan, protesters were supposed to walk clockwise around the circle composed of the streets Sverdlova, Kirova, Babruiskaya and Independence Avenue. The action was pretentiously called “National Indefinite Strike – NIS”.

Of course, I was a bit confused with the very small number of people in the group of Pyotr Dubnyak – only a slightly more than 30 persons. I do not exclude that they came to the central train station, but their number was so small that nobody noticed them. But only a blind person could not have noticed the actions by the Minsk police…

A green MAZ prison vehicle near a drug store in Kirov Street is not a surprising thing. Unfortunately, these vehicles have become ordinary in Belarusian cities. Belarusians take this fact with irony joking that a timetable will soon appear and painting “tickets” to a new kind of public transport with Photoshop…

As for the quantity of plainclothes policemen at the central railway station in Minsk and the streets nearby, it could not but surprised guests of Belarus’s capital. One can think about the sense of wearing plain clothes if you have a walkie-talkie in your pocket. Moreover, a guff voices can be heard from their radio: “Zero one to zero seven, come into position!”

The largest number of plainclothes policemen was hiding in the pedestrian underpass near the central railway station. Small groups were noticed at most of the exits. I counted about 50 people. Some of them went out for a smoke and talk to one another from time to time.

Even more police officers had to suffer from heat in notorious police buses. One could see severe men in white t-shirts in the buses in the taxi parking lot near the railway station.

Police chiefs, as I could judge by bellies hanging over their belts, found a place to stand near the central entrance to the station building. Making clumsy attempts to hide their walkie-talkies (as if there were any sense to hide them with that specific noise heard from a distance of ten metres), they were giving orders to the subordinates and looking round like baited animals.

It would be wrong to say that nothing special happened at the central railway station. Herbalife distributors wearing company t-shirts and carrying huge bags with a logo of the still alive financial pyramid crowded at all platforms and waiting rooms after their international meeting drawing attention of other few passengers. But plainclothes policemen were not interested in these crooks. They obviously had another aim.

In the end, plainclothes men tired of pretending ordinary passers-by (with hissing walkie-talkies). They began to gather in groups discussing something. Some of them even smiled. Perhaps, the reason of the smiles was generous overtime pay...

It would be very funny, if it were not so sad: payment is given to these idlers and petrol is bought for prison vans and police buses from the state budget. Amid quiet reducing different governmental social programmes, stopping issuing soft home loans to young families and keeping salaries of teachers and doctors on a level “enough only not to die”, this looks like an odd feast in the time of plaque. If multiply these expenses by the number of “intellectual people” scuffing the paving slabs in front of the central train station, the picture will be far from joyful.

Another thing is clear too. The Belarusian authorities are so afraid of a possibility of grassroots rebel that even an anonymous message of thirty Internet users on a social networking site makes them take to streets all paunchy and bloated presidential army.

They seem to feel their blame…

Uladzimir Chudzyantsou, chudentsov.livejournal.com