29 March 2024, Friday, 14:51
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Rusty Bus Of Someone Else's War

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Rusty Bus Of Someone Else's War
IRYNA KHALIP
PHOTO: NASHA NIVA

The military valor for the aggressor is surrender, desertion and sabotage.

In the nineties, the bus of the 40th route with the inscription "Memory" used to run in Minsk. Originally a red two-car "Ikarus" was painted in camouflage colours, and photographs of Belarusians killed in Afghanistan were displayed inside. Several times I saw a young man in an Afghan uniform, very drunk and crying. He was always sitting in front of one of the pictures and, smearing his tears, he would mutter: "Siaroha, why did you die? Siaroha, who shall I avenge for you?"

Then I stopped taking that route and never met the fellow soldier of killed Siaroha again. But for some reason I have no doubt: his life was destroyed in the same place as Siaroha's, under the same fire, in the same country where a handful of Kremlin madmen had sent him. (However, if the sane ones had sent him there, nothing would have changed - neither for Siaroha nor for that drunkard, crushed by the senseless war).

The worst thing for the survivors was to realize the senselessness of that war. It meant that neither their lives nor their deaths were worth anything. There were too many young men in the vast USSR who could be thrown under tanks, jammed into cannon barrels and sent to mop up the kishlaks. Just the generals who were earning hard currency and dragging everything they could get out of the war, including connections with drug dealers, who offered them a nice addition to their paycheques, were few and far between. Soldiers, on the other hand, a helluva lot. Nobody counted the zinc coffins, they only came up with a pathetic formulation: "Died fulfilling the international duty". And the main thing is that the country which had sent those innumerable soldiers there has safely collapsed. It has gone into oblivion, leaving no address. And there is no one to be held responsible. There is nobody to take revenge on. And no one to render the account to. Therefore the friend of unknown to me dead Siaroha was crying, asking the photograph whom to avenge.

And I have no confidence that the country which attacked Ukraine on February 24 will not collapse after the current war. That country has fewer and fewer chances left. And it is now trying to increase those chances using Belarus.

While Lukashenko is habitually contradicting himself, either by saying he is fully prepared to join the war, or by promising that Belarus will never take part in it, Belarusian mothers are taking their sons of conscription age to any available destination (and the destinations, by the way, are getting fewer and fewer - "thanks" to the aggressor country for that). And the Belarusian military are keeping silent for some reason.

I hope they already have some important and courageous words of refusal ready, they are just waiting for the right moment to say them. I hope they know that there will be no more "Memory" buses and that no one will ever cry in front of their photos. I hope they have realised that "a soldier does not discuss orders" is a cumbersome and immoral formulation of the SMERSH and barrier troops era. I hope they know that their lives are valued only by themselves and their loved ones, not by the self-proclaimed commander-in-chief. I hope they realize that if they agree to take part in this heinous war, of which the diminutive inhabitant of the Kremlin bunker was dreaming, dying of boredom, they will destroy the future not only of our children, but also their own future as well.

We have been taught to love war for so long that we have started to hate it. We have been convinced so persistently that Belarus would never go to war, except for defending its own territory, that we have understood: they are lying again. We have been so insistently persuaded of the need of discipline, subordination and patriotism in the army as a sine qua non condition of its combat effectiveness, that we have learnt: in today's distorted by fire reality, surrender, desertion and sabotage become the valour.

By the way, that bus disappeared quietly from the streets of Minsk in the late nineties. Maybe it was repainted and covered with toothpaste adverts. Maybe it was thrown out to a landfill. Or it might have been melted down for something useful, together with a photo of the unknown Siaroha, of whom nothing else remained. And I don't know whether the man who was mourning his fallen comrade in the bus is still alive. Somehow it seems to me that he is not.

But we will survive. I still believe in the honour of the regiment. And in the common sense of the Belarusian military. Except, of course, of those who is well received in the corridors of Tsal Dir Biye. Those who have crossed that threshold for some reason immediately get infected with a virus of feeble-mindedness and cowardice. Fortunately, they are very few in number. And the only thing they dream of is to have a bunker with all the comforts of Putin, and to sit quietly in it till their death, so that the flies would not bite.

Maybe they will be saved from the flies. But no more than that.

Iryna Khalip, specially for Charter97.org

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