Belarusian dissidents fear the regime will put them into detention camps. It may have already built one
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These are the indications, according to videos seen by CNN and witness statements, of a possible prison camp for political dissidents, recently constructed around an hour’s drive from the Belarusian capital Minsk, near the settlement of Novokolosovo. It sits on the site of a Soviet-era missile storage facility, which spans over 200 acres. It is unclear how much of the site has been refurbished.
Franak Viacorka, a senior adviser to Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, viewed the footage and told CNN: “It is not surprising that [President Alexander Lukashenko] is trying to build something like a regular prison camp, because a new wave of protest will come up anyway. It can be triggered by his statements, it can be triggered by the economic situation. But it will come. He understands that, and he also wants to be prepared more than last year in 2020.”
In October, an activist group of former security officers, ByPol, released a recording they alleged to have been made of the deputy interior minister, Mikalay Karpyankou, in which he said “resettlement” prison camps needed to be built for more “sharp-heeled” protesters to reform them. In the recording, Karpyankou proposed building a camp out of an existing penitentiary in the town of Ivatsevichy.
The Belarusian government decried the recordings at the time of their release as “fake” news. The government did not respond to CNN’s request for comment for this article.
CNN has not been able to access the interior of the facility near Novokolosovo, and there are no signs the camp has yet housed prisoners. A western intelligence official told CNN the use of the facility as a prison camp was “possible,” although they did not have direct evidence to that effect. Locals in the town of Novokolosovo refer to the facility as “the camp.” One resident, told to leave the area by military guards recently when he approached the site, said: “My friend Sasha, a builder, told me they refurbished this place. There are three levels of barbed wire, and its electrified. I was picking mushrooms here when a military man came up to me and said that I can’t walk there.” Two other witnesses also observed military patrols.
The images of the camp emerge after a weekslong crackdown against the remaining independent media inside Belarus, and after heightened international attention on the crisis inside the authoritarian country.
The Belarus National Olympic Committee has said she was taken off the Olympic team because of emotional and had psychological issues, which she denies.
CNN has spoken to activists who say they have taken the step of sabotaging railway lines run by the Belarusian government. They sent CNN a series of videos which show them using an established technique of delaying trains without causing damage. CNN is not revealing the location or nature of the tactic, and has not been able to independently confirm the effectiveness of the protest actions.
One of the organizers, who said their activities have caused trains to slow to about 20 km an hour (12 mph) in some areas, told CNN: “The main goal is to cause economic damage to the regime, because the delays cause them to pay huge fines.”
Many of the railways that pass through Belarus ferry goods from China to the European Union, meaning frequent delays could have wider significance across the continent and for international trade, hitting Lukashenko’s regime hard in the pocket.
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