Khotsimsk: another application for a picket against foreign military airbases
Last
week Khotsimsk activists of the Belarusian Popular Front filed
another appeal to the Khotsimsk District Executive Committee to hold
a picket against the deployment of the foreign military airbases on
the territory of Belarus.
This time the activists appointed
the picet on 20 October and intended to hold it near the Khotsimsk
District Cultural Center.
According to the chairman of the
Khotsimsk district branch of the Belarusian Popular Front Valery
Karankevich, they had to postpone the picket, as far as officers of
the Khotsimsk DEC again posed some pretensions to the text of their
application.
"We intended to hold a picket in Khotsims
against the deployment of foreign military bases on the territory of
Belarus on 13 September in front of the Cultural Center”, says
Valery Karankevich. “We chose this day on purpose, as far as no
other events were apppointed on that day, about which I asked the
Khotsimsk ideologists. However, at the beginning of last week
Khotimsk officials again started posing pretensions. At first I was
asked to bring the list of the prospective members of the picket, to
which I responded that the official could come to the picket herself
and see them with her own eyes, as far as bringing such lists is not
provided for by the law. Then she posed some pretensions to the
orthography of the application for the picket, saying that
punctuation marks were missing in some places. We corrected it all
and filed a new application, for holding the picket on 20 October, as
far as the new application for 13 October could be rejected by the
officials due to missing the deadline for submission.
The
biased attitude of the Khotsims officials is obvious, they are trying
to do everything possible to to
prevent
the holding of
the picket against the foreign military bases in
Hotimsk, making claims to literally every comma. When I went to
complain on this matter to the deputy chairman of the executive
committee, Zhana
Kazakova, she tried to “sooth” me by saying “you'll have much
time left till the New Year to hold it”. I didn't understand what
she wanted to tell by saying this,” said Valery Karankevich.
Bear
in mind that earlier the Khotsimsk District Executive Committee
banned a picket against the deployment of foreign military bases in
the settlement of Khotsimsk on 8 September 2013.
The formal
reason for banning the picket near the district cultural center was
that the applicants allegedly failed to attach the undertaking to
hold the picket in that place.
The BPF activists, in their
turn, state they have filed such undertaking to the head of the
Khotsimsk District Executive Committee Fiodar Vishneuski, but the
authorities refused to consider it because of a small erratum, which
could be corrected in a few seconds.
