Long pause in mail correspondence with Ales Bialiatski
According to the wife of the human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, Natallia Pinchuk, she hasn't received any letters from him for more than two weeks, and is very worried with this fact. She refused to give any comments, saying she would wait a little longer.
The deputy chairman of the Human Rights Center “Viasna” Valiantsin Stefanovich received a letter from Mr. Bialiatski. Surprisingly enough, there was no letter from Bialiatski, but just a postcard of “Amnesty International” sent to him from Belgium and a clipping from a Belarusian newspaper.
Valiantsin Stefanovich doesn't know for sure what it can mean:
"For some reason, there was no letter in it. Maybe it was deleted, or Ales just didn't put any letter there – I don't know. By the way, he hasn't written to me for a long time already.”
Valiantsin Stefanovich doesn't rule out that Ales Bialiatski couldn't write a letter for some reasons and therefore sent the postcard in order to show that he kept receiving such letters.
The human rights defender says that the language of signals has already been used in their mail correspondence. For instance, this year Mr. Bialiatski hinted in a letter about the plans of the prison administration to take him to solitary confinement. LaterValiantsin Stefanovich learned that the administration was going to take Bialiatski to the penal cell for several days and a medical examination was carried out for it, but later the order was cancelled due to a visit of the Papal Nuncio Claudio Gugerotti.
After the receipt of the “letter without letter”, Mr. Stefanovich wrote his friend again. “Let's see what answer we will get – a normal or a conditional one again,” said the human rights defender.
The chairman of the Human Rights Center "Viasna" Ales Bialiatski was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for “large-scale concealment of income from abroad”. The human rights activist told the court that this money was spent solely on the aid to victims of political repression. Ales Bialiatski is serving his term in Babruisk penitentiary.
