BELARUS The backpack (and jail) of Belarusians

There are more than 8,000 detained for political reasons and more than 300,000 who have been forced to leave the country for the same reasons in a land of barely 10 million inhabitants. And since the Lukashenko regime forces citizens abroad to return to their homeland to reissue their passports, the number of stateless Belarusians in Europe and the world has multiplied exponentially.

Minsk () – The life of Belarusians today is characterized by two terms, the rjukzak, the backpack for carrying belongings, and the kešer, the suit to wear in prison. As documented in a Kommersant article, there are more than 8,000 Belarusians detained for political reasons, and more than 300,000 forced to leave the country for the same reasons. The author of the article, Jurij Komissarov, also calls them “Nansen's heirs”, in reference to the Norwegian explorer and politician Fridtjof Nansen, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1922 for his activities as High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations and inventor of the “Nansen passport” to protect stateless people. Since the dictatorial regime of Aleksandr Lukašenko forced citizens abroad to return to their country to reissue their passports, the number of stateless Belarusians in Europe and the world has multiplied exponentially, as happened with the expelled dissidents of the Soviet Union undocumented.

Even the head of the Department of Citizenship and Migration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Minsk, Aleksej Begun, recently admitted that between 2021 and 2022, more than 200 thousand citizens left the country. Beyond the official figures, according to several experts, the number of emigrants ranges between 300 and 500 thousand, for a population of less than 10 million: more than 5%, compared to the 145 million and a half Russians, the fleeing relokanty of war and mobilization, which affects Belarus much less directly.

The repressions that began after the challenges to the president's re-election in 2020 were harsh and impetuous, and many managed to avoid them by rushing out of their apartments with backpacks on their shoulders, half an hour before the police unceremoniously broke down their doors. Specially designed sentencing rules were applied with special sadism and ferocity to all fugitives, such as the last trick of renewing identity documents, whether they were expired or valid. The properties and goods left in the homeland have been confiscated, and only a few have managed to request political asylum in time in the countries of arrival on the routes of stateless nomadism, obtaining at least refugee status with a Nansen passport.

Children of Belarusian nomads born abroad will not be able to obtain Belarusian citizenship and will be “refugees by birth”, and the provisional documents do not allow those who obtain them to include any relatives, or even grant powers to those who stay at home. When special permits or any other certificates expire, one remains only an illegal immigrant, a status increasingly reduced by tightening regulations in Europe and America. Many Belarusians have simply refused to seek protection, hoping for change at home, and opposition leaders like Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the opponent who would have won the elections in 2020 if they had not been rigged, are trying to offer the documents of the “new Belarus” abroad.

In 2020, hope was still very much alive, and Poland had thrown its borders wide open to fleeing Belarusians with the certainty that the dictatorial regime would collapse very soon. Instead, Putin's war protected “his brother” Lukašenko from any danger of internal revolt, in effect “friendly” invading Belarus as a necessary shore for the “defense against Ukrainian Nazism” operation. It was precisely to Ukraine that many moved, only to flee even further with the approach of Putin's tanks in 2022, beginning the nomadic epic of the “Belarusian Bedouins”, as they often call themselves. Many have gone to Montenegro, one of the countries traditionally most welcoming to Eastern Slavs, but which does not issue any type of document to foreigners: this attracts businessmen, while blocking refugees like Kosovars before. , to which the Belarusians are now joining. A solution has been found in Georgia: the residence visa is renewed every year, and you have to take a round trip by bus from Batumi to Turkey to be able to stay in the country. Even so, that continues to be the fate of Belarusians, tied to the three usual daily factors: the backpack, the season, the unknown.