Run, Forest!

Our officials resemble of the incurables.

Every time law enforcement agents demonstrate other pictures with lots of money in suitcases and confused officials, I realize that our officials resemble of the incurables. They also make it through the same stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But unlike the diseased, officials have a chance to avoid these stages, cameras and wards. But somehow they don't. Faith in their impunity is also the decease. And it cannot be cured even in a remand prison, or a correctional facility, or after the release.

Do you remember the case of Ashmyany border guards? And the bathroom of one of them with $2 million dollars in it? It would seem there is nothing to do with such a sum in Ashmyany. Run, Forest! You'd better take the suitcase with money and escape abroad and cut a foreign border guard in on this affair, buy a passport of an island state and drink cocktails on the sea shore. But he did not escape. No one of more than a dozen of arrested was not thinking about the escape. Judging by the ability of border officials to repay damage of hundreds of thousands of dollars right in court, they could have assembled and buy plants, houses and new names. And to laugh at those who remained and were jailed.

Latest arrest prove the question: why is it needed to stay? What are they waiting for? $620 was found in the garage of head of Belmedtekhnika Sharak. The chief Belarusian pathologist Puchkou is accused of bribery amounted to $200 thousand. The same sum was found at Assistant to President Siarhei Rauneika. Compatriots, why did he go to work everyday and look at the picture of Lukashenka in his office, report on successes? Why did not they escape? Given that all of them are grownups. All of them remember arrests of prosecutors, policemen, mayors, ministers, directors of state-owned enterprises, businessmen and bankers. Did they question their future? I guess they did not.

Yes, they are the incurables. The only and the main symptom of the disease is simple: when you take a bribe for the first time, you think that it will always like that. And even being jailed you keep thinking it can't be true and Lukashenka himself will come and give you a helping hand saying "sorry, dude, it was a mistake. And he will take you away far from this stinky ward and you will find yourself in a beautiful palace.

But it is fiction. Some lucky bastards manage to be released before the term is served, to be pardoned and to head a fading collective farm. But no one has still managed to make his way back to spacious offices with lots of secretaries and assistants, and numerous beggars. Your personal devotion is the suitcase without a handle - no one needs it, even you. However, you give up on it, although with an ill grace, as a rule after the first extention of the term in custody. But no one cares anymore.

However, those who jail high corrupt officials, report on schemes revealed and money saved due to their hard-working, will also be jailed in neighboring wards. The number of jailed officials and money saved may somehow contribute to an immediate career promotion,but it does not serve as a mitigating circumstance in future. Law enforcement officers make all this mess not because they fight the corruption but because it is harder to hit a moving target. A running person has more chances to survive. If you stop, the game is over. The you'd better run, Forests, run. You'd better hurry up.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org