“Now in Homiel, 16-year-old Mikita Zolotarev is facing "trial." This is the boy who is accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the security forces. This is the boy who, after being detained, was beaten so that he ended up in intensive care. And this is the boy who was tortured in the detention centre to get his testimony.
"Dad, let the lawyer write the complaint. On December 29, officers beat me with a stun gun. I wanted to make a complaint to the operations employee, but it's no use. And one more thing: I write letters, but people don't receive them. Probably they are not being sent", Mikita said. Reread these words and think again: they were written by a teenager who is only 16 years old.
Of course, the Investigative Committee refused to investigate Mikita's beating "for lack of corpus delicti". Torturing a child is not a crime for them. Threatening a woman with rape is routine for them. Imprisoning a person for two years for drawings on billboards is the norm for them. They see nothing wrong with bringing a person to a 39-day hunger strike. They hold 186 political prisoners behind bars and have initiated more than a thousand criminal cases against people who demanded fair elections.
But Belarusians will never put up with this. We know that all these people are innocent and that in the new Belarus they will be called not prisoners of conscience but heroes of change. This Saturday, Belarusians will form solidarity chains for their heroes. And I will support everyone who comes out and stands in the chain. After all, to help them, we must speak about them as loudly as possible, write letters to them as often as possible and defend them until the very victory”.
