‘Police Randomly Stopped Cars In City Streets’

A family from Minsk is telling how they “celebrated” the City Day.

Katsiaryna, who is a Charter97.org reader from Minsk, has shared her family’s experience of the City Day “celebration”:

— On this day, my kids had a class in the computer academy, which is located in the center of the city, on Karl Marx Street. No one wanted to miss the classes so we needed to get to some serious preparations to take a trip to the city center.

So we took a clean telephone, which we had bought for such “festive days” long ago. We were getting there by taxi, to arrive as close to the academy doors as possible. The trip was good.

However, there were a lot of police in the center, also traffic police, I saw them from behind the window of the taxi. They randomly stopped the cars and checked people’s phones. So I sent my kids to the classes, and started thinking where I could go to get home safely later. Going to a park to sit on a bench — they could get on you for organizing some sort of a solo picket.

I decided to go to the GUM store, there are usually many people on Saturdays, and the likelihood of being grabbed by police is less when you are in a crowd of people. So I spent all the classes there, getting acquainted with people and gazing at the prices. Upon return, I even poured myself a shot and made a toast: to our freedom and yours! This is how the life under occupation looks like.

We didn’t have to go anywhere on Sunday, although we really wanted to go out on such a beautiful autumn day, but we decided not to risk. Stayed home.

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