Minsk City Executive Committee Deceives Mothers

Any popular movement for struggle for justice is dangerous for the authorities.

Yesterday in Minsk, activists and members of the initiative group for creating the Mothers’ Movement 328 held a press-conference, during which they voiced the received reply of the Minsk city executive committee on refusal for them to conduct a demonstration in the park near the Bangalore Square, the website bydc.info writes.

In the course of the action, they planned to attaract the public attention to the catastrophic situation in the sphere of the struggle with drug addiction. The said situation was in fact created by Lukashenka himself, by his Decree #6 dated December 28, 2014 “On Urgent Measures of Counteraction to Illegal Turnover of Drugs”.

What was initially aimed as systematic counteraction to big drug dealers in the reality resulted in chasing high indices, humbug and thousands of cases, made up under the principle “he bought an unknown substance from an unknown person in an unknown place...”.

Herein, basing on similar “proofs”, young people, most often ordinary customers and drug addicts, or couriers at the very best – get jailed for ages, 8 to 20 years. Alongside with that, some great work is done on “creation” of criminal groups with several dozen members.

Head of the initiative group for creating the Mothers’ Movement 328 Larysa Zhykhar read out the received official reply and set forth the statistical data on the number of people convicted under the Article 328. The formal reason for the denial to conduct the mass event for 500 people was the fact that some other event had been planned at the same venue on that very day.

However, no matter how long the representatives of the mothers waited for the said mysterious event to start in the Bangalore Square on the date, it never happened. Apparently, the officials of the Minsk city executive committee used this wording in order not to allow the mothers to hold their demonstration, having thus deceived them. Apart from that, the mothers’ movement cannot obtain official registration despite all the attempts.

Thus, the authorities not only push the mothers to conduct a non-sanctioned event, but show once again that only those public associations which were set up or controlled by the special services can receive an official permission to conduct an action or to obtain registration.

As for some real people’s movement, like the Mothers’ Movement 328 – they are dangerous for the current authorities as they represent an uncontrolled force (in Belarus, thousands of people are convicted under article 328), fuelled not by orders and instructions, but by real care about the future of children, relatives and friends.

The mothers will appeal the denials in the near future.