Special Services Persecute Baranavichy University Students for Political Beliefs and Threaten Expulsion

21.10.2005.

The thing is that in the night of 18 and 19 October someone stuck on some of the buildings in Baranavichy stickers staying "Wind of Change – Young Front". After this event special services started to persecute the students and their fathers. According to the information provided by the chair of Baranavichy-based Young Front Marchyk Siarzhuk, on 20 October investigators came to the financial and law department of Baranavichy State University. The dean of the department came to our group right in the middle of the class and asked me out for a conversation. One investigator was there during the conversation (unfortunately, I did not note his name and position). He said that the guard of Baranavichy School No.11, where some of the stickers had been found, had provided a description of a person that looks like me. The investigator asked ordinary questions like where I was in the night of 18 October and whether I saw such stickers before, whether I know people involved with "anti-governmental activities", which member I represent and so on.
After I was released, my group mate Iuruts Andrus (YF member) was also asked out for a conversation. They asked him the same questions. The first words that Andrus told me as he left: "I have never met with such insolence before … and never thought I would". After the investigators left, I was called to the dean's office and again (a third time in the recent month) pressurized me ideologically, threatening expulsion from the university and promising "help" with failing the session exams (the most insulting thing is that I believe what they promise to do). I was told that I had already "tired them with my pluralism" – most interestingly, this statement came from the finance and law department administration. Following these events I went home, hoping that everything was over and I could relax. I should not have hoped so. News awaited me at home. My mother said that the deputy chair of Baranavichy KGB phones my father at work and threatened I would be expelled from the university, promised they would arrange search in the house and launch an administrative action against me for distributing anti-governmental materials. Apart from that, my father twice had to visit the head of the ideology department of the machine tools plant (where my father works) who talked with him on obvious topics.

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