Page 48 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine May 2024

48 I Eastern Europe bne May 2024
Nobel Peace Prize nominee Olga Karatch says Belarusians have fallen out of favour with the Lithuanian government. / Olga Karatch
Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in February. I think my case in the court
is the first of its kind from a Belarusian citizen living in Lithuania. But I am sure that other Belarusians will follow me and ask the court to step in. As of now, around 2,500 Belarusians are regarded as a national threat to the state
of Lithuania, which is just preposterous. I categorically disagree with that and see it as political manipulation.
Are you allowed to stay in Lithuania until the Strasbourg court’s ruling is announced?
I am. I am on a humanitarian visa here now. The situation is absurd to me –
as an applicant for asylum, deemed
a threat to the Republic of Lithuania, I can stay here on humanitarian grounds. My humanitarian visa is valid through August, and I suppose it will be extended. Until now, it was extended automatically.
What happens if you get a negative answer from the local migration department in the autumn?
I cannot rule out that I will be extradited to Belarus, where capital punishment awaits me as someone on its terrorist list. In addition, I am a defendant in three new criminal cases against me, including
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on charges of attempting to commit a coup in the country.
Sadly, Lithuania’s State Security Department is looking for enemies in the wrong direction, towards the Belarusians in Lithuania. As far as I know, there is not a single Belarusian citizen arrested on charges of espionage here.
Yet, you are not denying you went to Moscow on several occasions.
That’s correct. The last time was in 2016, when I went there for a conference whose participants included Russian government members, NGOs and an array of foreign guests. Then the political
Moscow was unimportant. I met various people while in Moscow, but, of course, no one from the FSB or KGB.
Do you know Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who ran in the
2020 Belarusian presidential election and who has been living in exile in Vilnius since then?
I know her quite well. We’ve met several times. But to be frank, now, she is in a completely different situation than in 2020, when she had a historical chance to make change in the country, uniting all the democratic opposition forces.
I don’t think another chance of this kind will come in the next 50 years.
“I cannot rule out that I will be extradited to Belarus, where capital punishment awaits me as someone on its terrorist list”
situation was quite different. Ahead of the Belarusian presidential election in 2015, Lukashenko was trying to befriend the West while tightening his grip on domestic affairs, Ukraine was not at war, so against that background, my trip to
I’ll put it bluntly – she squandered the chance, dividing the opposition into “correct” democrats and not “correct”.
It makes me sad, as so much energy has been wasted on squabbles and bickering within the opposition. I am sure if the