How Belarusians Got To ‘Hunger Riots’

It is possible to achieve something only if you protest and demand.

Participant of one of the first resonance-making hunger strike in the contemporary history of Belarus Yury Khadyka once noted in an interview that, back in spring 1996, he and Viachaslau Siuchyk dared for desperate measures, also hoping that it would be the first and the last protest experience of this kind, Solidarity writes.

That protest of Khadyka and Siuchyk was successful - the authorities were forced to yield to the international pressure and release political prisoners from the remand prison. However, the history of hunger strikes in Belarus did not end on this. Rather, it just started then.

Ten years later, not only opposition politicians and activists got to hunger strike as the last step. Dozens of entrepreneurs were on a hunger strike in Vitsebsk in 2004, protesting against the new trade rules.

In 2006, several hundred protestants went on a hunger strike in Minsk, protesting against the decision of the authorities to deprive them of their church building.

- The last year has already become a record-breaking year with regard to hunger strikes in Belarus. People were engaged in individual and mass hunger strikes. In Minsk and in smaller cities. In prisons and at large. Housewives and politicians. There is no doubt that this year will break all records, - Sviatlana Kalinkina wrote in June 2006 in her article “Hunger Riots”.

This is how she called individual and collective, political, economic, and common hunger strikes that took the entire country under, like a tide.

- Tightening the screws is just half of the work for a prison warden, even for a dictator. However, when people are put in a situation the only way out of which is a hunger protest, it means someone stripped the thread, - Kalinkina wrote.

This precise characteristic, sadly, preserved its timeliness until present days. The same as the conclusions of Viachaslau Siuchyk which he made in 1996 after the release from the remand prison. And the reasons that force prisoners to desperate measures.

- It was a discovery for me in which conditions they hold people at the end of the XX century. Until that, I thought only public toilets could look like that. And the people, whose guilt has not been proved yet, must stay in such conditions for months, or even years. The people who have not been tried in a court yet, must sleep in turns, three persons per one sleeping place, - the politician told in an interview with the newspaper “Svaboda”.

According to Siuchyk, a GULAG system has been preserved in belarus, and Belarusians have failed to build a rule-of-law state.

- Today, any Belarusian citizen can be illegally sentenced to many years of imprisonment in inhumane conditions, - these words sound timely today.

Another message from the 90s. Describing the confinement conditions in the remand prison, Siuchyk and Khadyka mentioned the informational blockade organized by the prison administration - no newspapers, no letters.

These are the conditions inmates are held in the Zhodzina remand prison.

A lot has been said about the prison routines remaining virtually unchanged in the last quarter of the century. Here is a new word of a person who was forced to declare a hunger strike as protest against the inhumane conditions and the guards’ attitude.

- As a person who went through a hunger strike, I must say that this is done not because someone wants it. But because it is the only way of struggling when you are there, - journalist Yauhenia Douyhaya wrote in support of Ihar Losik. - Because they put you in a cold, shabby, stinky cell, and at the same time - in the vacuum.

You body thus automatically become the only tool for fighting with the surrounding absurdity. Any moment a guy with a baton can walk in and do whatever he wants with you. He can take away your bottle with warm water - the only source of heating, he will take away your sports shoes, anything that makes your life a little better.

It is possible to achieve something only if you protest and demand. Even in such places.