English

Ukrainian topless protesters leave Belarus

 

Three activists of Ukraine`s women`s rights group Femen left Belarus shortly after midnight on December 21 after they said they had been abducted and terrorized by security services following their topless protest in front of the KGB headquarters in Minsk on Monday, BelaPAN said.

The phones of the young women, Inna Shevchenko, Oksana Shachko and Oleksandra Nemchinova, went dead several hours after the protest. Their whereabouts were not known until Tuesday afternoon, when they phoned an associate to say that they had been abducted, beaten, humiliated and dumped in a forest near the Ukrainian border, with their phones and passports seized. After spending a few hours in the forest, they finally arrived at a village, Beki, located two kilometers away from the Ukrainian border, where they asked a man to give them his phone to make the call.

Officers of the Yelsk district police department arrived at the man’s house. They first took the women to a hospital for a medical examination and then drove them to the police station. Ukraine’s consul in Belarus arrived there.

Doctors said that the women had bruises on their arms and other parts of the bodies.

At around 1 a.m., the police put the activists in the consul’s car. Escorted by Belarusian border guard officers, the car set off toward the Novaya Rudnya border crossing.

The consul refused to comment to journalists at the scene about the status of the women, while a border guard officer said that they were being deported.

Alyaksandr Tsishchanka, spokesman for Belarus’ State Border Committee, however told BelaPAN on Wednesday morning that no deportation order had been made against the activists. They did not violate border regulations, as they were allegedly dumped near the border by their captors, said Mr. Tsishchanka.

At approximately 2 a.m., the Femen activists were turned over to Ukrainian border guard officers in the presence of the consul, according to him.

Outside the hospital in the Yelsk district, the women told journalists that they were abducted at the Uskhodni bus station in Minsk on the evening of December 19. Six men approached them and suddenly attacked them, pulling caps down the women’s faces and bundling them into a vehicle.

The activists were taken to the woods, beaten, forced to undress and hold Nazi banners and doused with brilliant green. Everything was videotaped, they said.
Pyotr Kuznyatsow, an opposition activist based in Homyel, traveled to the village of Beki to bring warm clothes and food for the women.

“In the village, I visited the man who sheltered the girls,” Mr. Kuznyatsow told BelaPAN. “Three policemen were questioning Alyaksandr Sery at the moment, which was at around 9 p.m. He said that the girls had only asked him to allow them to stay at his place to get warm and dry their wet clothes. Police soon arrived to take them away, he said.”

It was not immediately clear whether the police had opened a probe in connection with the activists’ abduction allegation.

The topless protest in front of the much-feared agency`s headquarters in Minsk`s Independence Avenue was timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the brutal dispersal of the December 19, 2010 post-election protest in Minsk. The three activists bared breasts, wearing false mustaches and holding signs “Freedom to political prisoners” (in English) and “Long Live Belarus” (in Belarusian). KGB security officers quickly broke up the demonstration, arresting three journalists.