Film about murdered Lukashenka’s opponents screening in Vilnius

A screening of a documentary “A Gang” about the Belarusian regime and disappeared Belarusian politicians and journalists has taken place in the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Vilnius.

The organisers of the run were the Belarusian House of Human Rights in Vilnius, Freedom House and the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Lithuania, DELFI.lt reports.

Representatives of the diplomatic corps of the states accredited in Lithuania, representatives of the Belarusian community, human rights activists, journalists were present. The first release of the film took place in Washington. Volha Zavadskaya, the mother of the abducted cameraman Dzmitry Zavadsky, one of the protagonists of the film, was present at the even as well.

It was the first release of the documentary in Lithuania, and it was shown in an expanded version. The audience is acquainted with the chronicles of disappearances of the well-known politicians, opponents of Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and with the information how and who had been actually neutralizing them.

“What kind of film it is and why it has been created now? 16 years ago, on May 7, the first political opponent of Lukashenka’s regime, Yury Zakharanka, disappeared. Since then three more opponents of the regime disappeared, and criminal cases are in fact frozen. No one knows about the fates of these disappeared people, and no one knows whether the criminal cases have been investigated successfully,” Raisa Mikhajlouskaya, the head of the documentary centre, said. It is a non-governmental organization situated in Belarus, engaged in collection of legal evidence of human rights violations committed in the period of Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s rule.

The documentarian reminded that since then a new generation of Belarusians has grown, and diplomats in diplomatic corps of different countries have changed. “No one of them, or just some of them, know from hearsay the details (of the disappearances of the regime’s opponents),” she said.

As said by Mikhajlouskaya, this film is necessary as an evidence for the future history, future criminal cases.

“Besides, it is a moral support for the families of the disappeared. Our aim as human rights activists is to keep these facts of evidence,” the author of the film stressed. “Besides, it is a memory about those people. They are not just 4 disappeared persons. They are really an elite, a political elite of Belarus, and these disappearances led to a chain of irreversible consequences, and caused the situation Belarus experiences now.”