Zimbabwe News Update
bbc
5 min read
Larysa would have been happier staying in prison for the final four months of her sentence, if she could have gone home at the end of it.Instead she was bussed over the border from Belarus into Lithuania with 51 other political prisoners. They were released in September as part of a deal to relax sanctions hatched between Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko and US President Donald Trump.During the three years she spent behind bars for “extremism” and “discrediting” Belarus, Larysa Shchyrakova missed her mother’s funeral. Now she cannot visit her grave.She left behind her son, her home, her dog and all her possessions. Like most of the freed prisoners, Larysa has no documents, and risks arrest if she returns.”You lose everything overnight.
It’s a traumatic thought that at 52, you’re essentially homeless,” she told the BBC.
In reality she had no choice.Veteran opposition politician Mikola Statkevich got off Larysa’s bus and refused to cross the border. He has not been heard of since, and it is assumed he was sent straight back to jail.Mikalai Dziadok, a 37-year-old activist, spent five years behind bars and was marked with a special yellow tag, which meant tighter control and harsher treatment.Yellow rather than white tags originally highlighted prisoners at risk of suicide or escape, so guards could keep a closer look at them.But for Mikalai and others it was used for political prisoners deemed “prone to extremism”.
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