Freed Belarus activist says she was tortured in prison
VILNIUS: A Belarusian activist who was freed from prison and escaped to Lithuania said Monday she was tortured and forced to undergo “punitive” psychiatric treatment in custody.
Polina Sharenda-Panasyuk, an activist previously based in the city of Brest in western Belarus, served four years and one month in prison for opposing President Alexander Lukashenko’s rule during mass protests in 2020.
She is one of the most high-profile Belarusian prisoners to be released in several months, and her testimony is a rare recent account from inside the country’s notorious prison system.
“They hospitalised me in a psychiatric hospital… The tradition of punitive psychiatry has not gone away,” Sharenda-Panasyuk, 49, told a press conference in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.
“I saw the psychiatrist’s report in the prison, it said: ‘Calls herself a political prisoner, diagnosis: paranoid personality disorder,'” she added.
She said she spent more than 270 days in isolation or punishment cells, describing them as comparable to “the cellars of the NKVD”, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s feared 1930s secret police force.
Sharenda-Panasyuk was one of more than 3,700 political prisoners who have been jailed in Belarus over the last five years, according the Viasna rights group.
She declined to give details of how she fled Belarus, where she was under police watch and would not have been allowed to leave legally.
She was joining her two sons and husband, who have lived in Lithuania since she was imprisoned.
‘Moral terror’
Sharenda-Panasyuk said the dozens of other political prisoners who have been pardoned over the last six months are being forced to cooperate with Belarus’s KGB security service.
“There is a practise that has formed in freeing political prisoners. A person is tortured, tortured, tortured and at one moment they go to them to write for a pardoning,” she said.
After being told that “I will never leave here, I will never see my children,” she wrote the request, directly to Lukashenko, she said.
Prisoners are also made to ask for pardons on camera, she said.
So that a person is “completely broken, discredited and never thinks of politics again, they are forced to sign a confidential document of cooperation” with the KGB, she said.
At the press conference, Sharenda-Panasyuk said she had signed the papers, “knowing that I may never get out of this prison. I disavow these documents.”
She described the punishment cells where she was contained as a “naked room” where windows never open, with women sleeping on “bare bunks”.
“It is constant moral terror. There is an open toilet. The light is on 24 hours. It is very cold,” she said.
Lukashenko, in power since 1994, extended his more than three-decade rule in an election last month in which he faced no genuine competition.
In a press conference after the vote, he said some of his opponents “chose prison, others chose exile,” adding: “This is democracy.”
