Who Created Hell For Riot Police

The law enforcers are wide awake now.

Dzmitry Balaba, commander of the Minsk riot police, complained on air of STV: "The life of riot policemen has been turned into hell this year". And it's true. It couldn't be said better, educator and writer Hanna Seviarynets writes in an article for Radio Svaboda.

Yes, comrade Balaba. Unfortunately, the life of the riot police has been turned into hell.

It really is hell when you, a young guy, much younger than your commanders, ministers and presidents, have to think every day: What will happen after that? They won't give up, they'd rather die, and then where am I supposed to go?

After all, it really is hell - if you, a young guy, can't go out to the store without a balaclava, for a beer in the park without fear, to the movies without security.

For it really is hell when your classmates and former friends don't say hello to you, and your neighbors wouldn't take the lift with you.

It's nothing short of hell if you look through the telegram channels every morning: who have leaked information of what kind to ByPol.

Indeed - to live the events of that night over and over again in your head and think feverishly: won't they recognize me on the video later?

What if I got on camera somewhere? And will they really not give me away, the first or the only one of them, because someone will be given away, someone will be sacrificed, someone will be traded for money from Europe or even from Russia (have you heard the Russians saying today: these are not our methods? What does it mean? We can't go there now either - right?)

A scary, infamous, not very understandable word - "lustration," up yours, get the baton in the ass, there's no lustration, you damned protesters, but what if there is one? What if there is lustration? Go to hell with your lustration, let me sleep!

But you cannot sleep. You keep awake. The life of the riot police is made into hell. You can't sleep in hell.

At that they lie, that we get tons of money. Choke on that money. We don't get the big money.

We have to keep under the radar now even if they don't pay at all. Where to go?

And kids are embarrassed to say in kindergarten that their father works for the riot police. It has been forbidden long ago to say such things. And the wife does not tell anyone.

And you can't go to the village. And the mother is afraid to go out into the street.

And there's no way out.

Hell is just that, when there is no way out.

If you even do realize everything - nope. You clench your teeth and go ahead, into the thick of it, into the hell. After all, it's behind you, too.

Yes, Comrade Balaba. Unfortunately, the life of the riot police has been turned into hell.

You would like us to feel sorry for them? I do feel sorry. I feel very, very, very sorry from the bottom of my heart for the young, handsome guys who were once cradled in the arms of their mothers, who used to love girls, who used to undress on the beach in summer - and the common man would look at their biceps and triceps with admiration. That would never happen in their lives again.

And now that this truth has been told, find the strength in yourself - and answer the question. Who has turned their life into hell? By whose order did they become pariahs among men? And if they hadn't beaten, tortured and killed people, would they be living the way they are living now?

There's a Russian riot policeman who brought flowers to the woman he had beaten up in the intensive care unit. We all realize, you and I, that he's probably not that remorseful, so as to go with flowers to some woman. He just doesn't want his life to be turned into a living hell. And his boss, by all appearances, doesn't particularly want it.

And ours probably wouldn't want it either. But that's what hell is. You don't want to go to hell, but get there. And there's no way out.