Coronavirus in Belarus: Authorities Know What They've Done

Lukashenka and officials of the Ministry of Health will be tried in future Belarus.

Congratulations, the Belarusian authorities have finally “defeated the coronavirus”! How? It's very simple: they sent to jail the organizers of the exhibition "The Machine Breathes, but I Don't" Tatstsiana Hatsura-Yavorskaya and Natallia Trenina. Together with them, their colleague from the public association Zveno Yulia Semenchenka went there. The exhibition was closed, the organizers were “locked up” - now the state can sleep peacefully. If it does not see the coronavirus, then it does not exist.

The closing of this exhibition looks logical against the background of the entire Belarusian policy regarding the pandemic. Lukashenka, on the other hand, stated long ago that a pandemic is a psychosis, so the state is fighting this “psychosis” according to its ideas about psychiatric care. He declares society "abnormal" and, as best he can, prohibits all possible activities.

Just as mental illness has long been (and now often remains) a taboo topic in society, so the coronavirus has become a taboo for the authorities. It should not only be ignored - this will not correct the situation. To get rid of the infection, it must be banned. Virtually all references, and even more so documentary evidence, fall under the ban.

Behind this all, of course, there is a great fear that the collected evidence in the future may be used against Lukashenka and officials from the Ministry of Health if crimes against the people are investigated in new Belarus. If they are charged with deliberately misleading people, publicly insulting the deceased, forgery of documents, deliberate mass infection in temporary detention centers and other places.

Truth always works better than any propaganda. So at the exhibition, there was no propaganda, but there were simple testimonies of people - those who were sick with coronavirus and those who treated them. But showing these true testimonies is the same as pulling the thread and starting to unwind a ball of lies, mutual covering, and the eternal "well, you understand."

In my family, two people have died from complications from the coronavirus, so no, I don't understand.

It would seem, well, what danger is to the state from the fact that people will see how someone wrote: while I was on artificial ventilation, there was no air? All over the world, people in hospitals suffered and died from the coronavirus. But officials in Belarus may connect this inscription and the emergency situation in the Vitsebsk hospital, where people died due to an emergency shutdown of the oxygen supply in the intensive care unit.

And so it is in everything. The authorities know what they have done, and the current repression once again confirms that all this was not accidental, not out of stupidity, and not out of ignorance. That we were deliberately infected and killed, that we were deliberately lied to, and that we were deliberately denied medical care at the state level.

Therefore, under the current government in Belarus, there will be no monuments to the fallen doctors, no monuments to patients who could not be saved. There will be no respect and gratitude at the state level to everyone who helped each other. And, of course, there will be no work on mistakes. After all, to correct mistakes, they must first be admitted, and this is not yet a Belarusian way of overcoming difficulties.

Well, the truth is, the authorities do not recognize that people in Belarusian isolation wards were deliberately infected with coronavirus and that a criminal case was opened against Tatstsiana Hatsura-Yavorskaya for helping people and showing the truth about the fight against the virus in Belarus.

No, the authorities will definitely not agree to this. It would be too humane.

Nasta Zakharevich, Radio Svaboda