‘Two Majors have recently had a talk with me. One of them said I was officially recognised ‘inclined to attack and escape’, which I have known for long, and to ‘hostage-taking’, which I have not been aware of yet. I am amazed by the both majors’ courage – they were alone with such a dread man,’ the politician wroe to his wife Maryna Adamovich.
Maryna Adamovich considers such accusations as ‘the theatre of absurdity’. ‘But these [accusations] bring real results which complicate a prisoner’s life and worsen their confinement conditions. The correspondence problem has not been tackled, it has become aggravated – letters are seized, other petty provocative acts are being organised,’ she says.
According to Maryne Adamovich, the authorities keep trying to make Mikalai Statkevich ask the Belarusian President for pardon. But the ex-presidential candidate have repeatedly refused to petition Aliaksandr Lukashenka.
‘The more ‘advances’ and ‘positive messages’ Europeans see the stronger incentive the authorities have to solve the political prisoners’ problem using their own scenario – [forcing to] ask for mercy,’ the wife stresses.
It is to be recalled that after the recent meeting of the foreign ministers of the states-parties to the EaP initiative Linas Linkevičius, Lithuania’s FM, said that the relations between Belarus and the bloc should be reassessed.
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Mikalai Statkevich is the last 2010 presidential candidate to be in prison. The sentence given to Mr Statkevich in 2011 was one of the toughest: six years of imprisonment in a maximum security penal colony. The reason might be explained by the fact that in his election speech Mikalai Statkevich addressed to the current president demanding “to give back all that you have stolen”. The authorities are trying to embitter Statkevich’s life even in prison putting him to a disciplinary cell or making him share a ward with an AIDS sufferer. However, the former presidential candidate keeps mantaining his innocence and refuses to ask President Lukashenka for pardon.
