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Prisoners forced to eat cattle feed

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Prisoners forced to eat cattle feed

Cattle feed is put in Belarusian prisoners’ soup and porridge.

According to article 94 of the Criminal and Executive code of the Republic of Belarus, convicts must be provided with food needed for the body’s normal functioning.

Nevertheless, Radio Svaboda receives letters and phone calls from convicts who tell about the horrible situation with the prison food. Some of them describe it as “tortures with food”.

For some time ago, Mikalai Autukhovich who had complained on the prison food, claiming it was of law quality and unsuitable for human consumption, and criticized prison rules, was transferred from the Ivatsevichy reformatory to the Grodna prison with much tougher regimen. In particular, the prisoner wrote last year that the fish served to convicts was absolutely inedible: it was written on the containers with the fish “for short-term use for furry animals”. Moreover, the prisoner wrote that the goods sold in the reformatory store were of low quality and their storage term had expired.

And today a new signal from the prison has come. A convict of one of the Belarusian reformatories said:

”I’m holding a label from the bag dated 17 September 2002, that I’ve found in a food container of the canteen in our reformatory. I’m reading the text on the label:

“225406, the Republic of Belarus, Brest region, town of Baranavichy, 50 Years of BSSR Street 21 (ed.note: this is the address of the enterprise Baranovichkhelbprodukt that produces flour and cattle feed). Economy class cattle feed EK-K for cattle kept in barn. Nominal weight: 30 kg. Party number: 013. Storage: two months. Ingredients: rye, chalk, salt, first category wastes, wheat butts, barley, defluorized phosphate, premixes (ed.note: mixed dry ingredients of the cattle feed that ensure growth of the animal’s weight), vitamin mixes for cattle, grain mixture, sunflower schrot 35-38% (ed.note: concentrated feed, secondary product of production of oil extracts). Use according to its intended purpose.

I wonder what kind of cattle decided to feed us with that?”

The main assortment of the Baranovichkhelbprodukt is flour and cattle feed. The enterprise produces food for cows, pigs, dogs, cats and birds. Photographs of the products and advertisement can be found on the enterprise’s website. In particular, the producers publish the following information about the economy class product EK-K that, according to the convict, was found in the canteen: “the concentrated feed of economy class for cattle is a mixture enriched with minerals and biologically active elements”, which “is consumed as moist mass combined with succulent fodder.”

The convicts believe that the feed is probably added to their soup and porridge. It may even be used in the bread baked in the reformatory that tastes and looks weird.

Platform’s human rights activist Alena Krasouskaia has background in medicine. She says that she has come across different complaints on the quality of prison food, but such things are “beyond everything”:

“When I heard it, my hands started to shake. They are poisoning convicts. Those additives and mixtures are used to increase the animal’s weight and yields. They include antibiotics and hormones that simply kill our men, who get various health issues, including sexual, after they are released. I wonder if the manufacturers write everything on those labels. You never know what poison they added there. The question is, whether this is good for the animals, not to mention people,” Alena Krasouskaia says.

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