Whether It's Zero, Whether It's A Thousand

How the collective farmers are fooling Trump.

Just recently, the US president proudly told on his social network Truth Social that Lukashenka had promised him to release 1,200 political prisoners. This was in August last year. In September, during a meeting with journalists at the White House, Donald Trump said that 1,400 or 1,500 political prisoners would be released in the near future. The imminent future never came, there was no way out of the dumbed-down past.

Now the same thing is going on in Venezuela. There was no limit to our universal joy when news of the release of political prisoners began to come from there: 800 or a thousand - what a scale! If we did not succeed, at least the Venezuelan opposition would be released. Some time passed, and the real figures emerged from the pink clouds of euphoria: only a couple dozen political prisoners were released from prison. And there are no opposition leaders among them at all. Colleagues from Venezuela are throwing up their hands: yes, we wrote, we disseminated information about a thousand released, but we were very cleverly deceived.

Trump is probably still being written to and told that everything is on track, and the political prisoners are already one foot free. The other, of course, is in shackles, but the president of the United States is not petty, he may not pay attention to such unimportant details. I have no doubt that his administration regularly receives the same promises from Minsk: it's almost here, it's almost here, now, wait a minute. Meanwhile, during the period between the two waves of expulsion of Belarusian political prisoners, from September 12 to December 13, 199 people were recognized as new political prisoners. And 123 people were expelled from Belarus on that December day. That is, the balance is still in favor of the punishers, while the number of those arrested for political reasons is only increasing.

It's impossible to even give exact figures. 199 new political prisoners from September to December are only those who are known to human rights activists. The other day I spoke with Ales Bialiatski, and he told me that in the colony in Gorki, where he was imprisoned, there were ten political prisoners recognized by human rights activists and six more - the same political prisoners, but not included in the lists. For various reasons - some of them were not known about, their relatives were afraid to pass information to the "enemies of the people", someone, perhaps, preferred to serve time as an ordinary convict rather than an extremist with a yellow tag. So we don't know and won't know the actual number of those who are in jail for their political stance, comments, donations, participation in protests until the government changes and the archives and mouths are opened.

The numbers, however, sooner or later will be known to everyone. That's not what I'm talking about right now. It's just that American diplomats and officials who are sincerely trying to help freedom fighters in Venezuela, Belarus, Nicaragua, Iran, do not take into account one important thing. Dictatorial regimes do not hold on repression alone. They are held together by monstrous lies. To a dictator, a lie is like a sneeze. You want a thousand convicts, Trump? Please: I promise you I'll free them. You want a million? Three times. It doesn't cost me anything to promise, but it'll make you feel good. Sanctions will be lifted, and then something new will happen - in Iran, for example. And there will be new tasks that need to be solved urgently. And the politzeks will sit - who will remember them now, when Iran is on fire?

Ayatollahs, by the way, act in the same way as all the dictators of the world, from Venezuela to Belarus. They offer Trump negotiations. The mechanism is the same - to promise anything, as long as America does not strike. And then, you may see another fire somewhere else, and now Iran will no longer be the most important topic on the world agenda. By the way, the ayatollahs promised to sign a nuclear program agreement with the U.S. last spring. Just as Lukashenko promised to release political prisoners.

He has been saying for decades: I will put them all in one airplane and let them go wherever they want, less people - more oxygen. Surprisingly, many people still take his words seriously. They quote, refer to, predict ("analysts believe, based on Lukashenko's promises, that all political prisoners will be released before May Day, but the full moon and Mercury retrograde may slightly shift this date towards Ivan Kupala"). And they don't realize that they are simply spreading lies.

One political prisoner, by the way, is still considered released by all American papers. That's Nikolai Statkevich. He will not be added to the lists a second time. And why should they? The promise has been fulfilled.

Irina Khalip, especially for Charter97.org.

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