Brest Activist: As Soon As People Come To Rally, Authorities Start ‘Repairs’

Strange things are happening in the village of Telmy.

On August 11, opponents of the battery plant gathered again in the Lenin Square in Brest. Such meetings are held here every Sunday from February 25, 2018, racyja.com reports.

According to human rights activist Uladzimir Vialichkin, at 12.40 there were about 150 people in the square. As reported by a Charter97.org correspondent, the number of people later increased to more than 300.

The participants spoke of the need to achieve the final closure of the plant and to not only gather here in the square in the city center, but also to hold protest actions.

Yesterday, signatures were collected in the square under a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s Office about repairs in the stadium of the Prybuzhzha sports school for children and youth in the village of Telmy, Brest region. This site is provided by the decision of the local authorities for public events.

All rallies announced in June at the stadium against the battery plant were banned by the officials on the grounds that repairs had begun there. The complaint stated that “in early June, the track was removed at the stadium, 4 piles of sand / gravel were poured along the edges of the stadium and a “repairs underway” sign was hung up. No more work was done at this site in June, July and August.”

“We believe that these “repairs” were deliberately invented to prevent us from holding a rally against the construction of a battery plant,” the appeal addressed to the Prosecutor General said.

The signatories are asking for prosecutorial response to the officials of the Brest district executive committee, for they had initiated these fictitious, in their opinion, repairs at the stadium, as well as against the officials of the organization carrying out the “repair works”.

In the words of resident of the Telmy village Aliaksandr Valko, that he said during a meeting on Lenin Square, “they are not doing any repairs there.” “They don’t even mow grass. Nobody does anything there,” he said. “They have a trend like this. As a rule, as soon as people want to gather together, they immediately announce some urgent job at that place.”

In this regard, the meeting participants recalled how the authorities, in order to prevent rallies against the construction of the plant in the Park of Internationalist Warriors (a permitted venue for mass events), reported repairing the site or treating the park against ticks, but in fact, none of these were carried out.

According to Raman Kislyak, signatures under the complaint are collected not only in Brest, but also in the village of Telmy, where the stadium is located. In the coming days, this complaint will be addressed to the Prosecutor General of Belarus. After the meeting in the square, which lasted until about 12.40, the opponents of the plant walked along the central streets of Brest - Pushkinskaya and Savetskaya - to the cinema Belarus. The march involved more than 300 people.