Spring Call-Up

Do generals remember a woman by the name of Svetlana?

Yesterday they sang, danced and drank at the Officers' House. It was a company party on the eve of March 8. Aleh Belakoneu, Chief of General Staff, was profuse in compliments to dressed women, told them how wonderful they were and how they made men be better. Officers were handing out roses to guests. I wonder if the chief remembered about a woman named Svetlana, who will not get a rose, a tulip or a postcard.

She has no one to congratulate her because her son Sasha Korzhych was murdered in the army, and pomaded officers will not want to remember her. Although they should have come, kneeled down, covered her with flowers, repaired faucets, carried bags, and begged for forgiveness to the end of her days. But then such a beautiful holiday would be quite different. It is better to forget and pretend that nothing happened, isn't it? They can't even do that. The state has set itself the goal to copy Korzhychs and therefore their mothers.

It turns out we're lack of recruits. The spring call-up can turn out to be a failure. Young men don't want to serve in the army. And now the whole state machine has launched the campaign on how to force them. Of course, the school, which does not teach patriotism, is the first to blame. So, apart from terrifying textbooks of preservice training, which show Belarus besieged by enemies; ministries of defence and education develop a new project, which make PE teachers responsible for patriotism and appoint them as head teachers of patriotic studies.

It turns out we're lack of recruits. The spring call-up can turn out to be a failure. Young men don't want to serve in the army. And now the whole state machine has launched the campaign on how to force them. Of course, the school, which does not teach patriotism, is the first to blame. So, apart from terrifying textbooks of pre-service training, which show Belarus besieged by enemies; ministries of defence and education develop a new project, which make PE teachers responsible for patriotism and appoint them as teachers of patriotic studies.

Together with the Ministry of Health, the army will reduce the number of diseases that do not require recruitment. Together with the Ministry of Labor, they will draw up a list of professions and positions not available for those not having served in the army. Civil service will be unavailable for them - it is written on the official website of the Ministry of Defense - and warrant officer from Unit 3214 may become the next Minister of Education, because Minister Karpenka did not serve in the army. Together with the Interior Ministry, the army will include all Belarusians of draft age, who have not served in the army, in the list of those who cannot leave the country. Border guards will be tired of not letting them across the border. while reasons of non-service are being investigated.

However, it will be like that: at first, there will be so much shaking on the border that Belarus will be declared an earthquake endangered zone. And parents will start evacuating their children as schoolchildren to avoid pre-service training under a jointly developed textbook and upbringing of patriotism by a PE teacher. And then it will turn out that there are no Belarusians of draft age left in the country. One day Günter Grass asked Kurt Vonnegut how old he was. Having learned that Vonnegut was born in 1922, Grass said: "There are no men of your age left in Europe". The same thing awaits us. And without any war.

Young Belarusians will flee from the army - and therefore from the country - not because they are weak, but because they value their lives more than Br15 per day. (That's exactly how much you had to pay not to be killed, Aliaksandr Korzhych explained to his mother.) They don't want to be hanged in the basement. They do not want their mothers to stay without flowers on March 8 and cry. When the army changes, then they will go to serve. But the army will not change separately from the country.

So, the commander-in-chief tries to humiliate Belarusians for nothing, claiming that men avoiding the army die out as a class and will not be able to use handed out weapons in case of war. Let him speak for himself - he himself has long died out as a class. Belarusian men have one peculiarity: they do not use "handed out weapons". When necessary, they just take these weapons without asking. And it's not about assembling and disassembling them against the clock.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

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