8/18/20
Artyom Vazhenkov said that when darkness fell at the notorious detention center in the Belarusian capital of Minsk where he was held for several days, the screaming from those being tortured echoed into the night. "It was horrible -- not what I saw, but what I heard" Vazhenkov said in an interview with Current Time after his release. "At night, from our window outside we could hear people howling, screaming." Now back in Moscow, Vazhenkov described the torture, abuse, and inhumane conditions that he and others held at the Okrestina detention center endured. Some 7,000 people have been detained in the protests that erupted across Belarus after longtime President Alyaksandr Lukashenka was declared winner of the country's presidential election on August 9. In Minsk, many have ended up at Okrestina and have spoken of and documented on social media the physical abuse they suffered while held there. Thousands have been released, but hundreds remain locked up. Amnesty International and local human rights groups have collected testimony from protesters in Belarus who describe being tortured or subjected to other ill-treatment in such facilities, including being stripped naked, beaten, and threatened with rape.
The international human rights organization says detention centers across Belarus have become "torture chambers." As evidence of abuse at prisons and on the streets mounted, some Belarusian police and other security service members have quit, with many documenting the move on social media by throwing their uniforms into the trash or other similar gestures. In an unusual move, a senior police officer in Lida denounced the "cruelty and brutality" meted out by security forces against protesters in Belarus. Vazhenkov said one of the more extreme forms of torture he witnessed was the so-called swallow, when a detainee is handcuffed behind his back and elevated. "This is guaranteed to cause dislocations." He said another extreme form of abuse was the "walk down the corridor." "This is when a naked person walks down a hallway with riot police standing on either side of the corridor, beating them with truncheons, hitting them all over," Vazhenkov described. Vazhenkov's account echoes those of other former detainees. According to accounts collected by Amnesty International, detainees in Minsk and elsewhere in Belarus were "severely beaten for the entire duration of their detention."