Roman Protasevich: A Belarus Activist Who ‘Refused to Live in Fear’

범위: In November 2019, the police in Belarus 부터 Ms. Tikhanovskaya had become the main voice of the Belarus opposition.

 

Disgusted by the brutality of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Mr. Protasevich bravely embarked at 16 on a life in opposition.

 

WARSAW — Since his teenage years as a rebellious high school student in Belarus and continuing into his 20s while in exile abroad, Roman Protasevich faced so many threats from the country’s security apparatus — of violent beatings, jail, punishment against family members — that “we all sort of got used to them,” a fellow exiled dissident recalled.

So, despite his being branded a terrorist by Belarus late last year — a capital offense — Mr. Protasevich was not particularly worried when he set off for Greece from Lithuania, where he had been living, earlier this month to attend a conference and take a short vacation with his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega.

But that sense of security was shattered on Sunday when they were snatched by Belarus security officials on the tarmac at Minsk National Airport after a MiG-29 fighter jet was scrambled to intercept his commercial flight home to Lithuania from Greece. Mr. Protasevich, 26, now faces the vengeance of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the 66-year-old Belarusian leader from whom he once received a scholarship for gifted students but has since defied with unflinching zeal.

In a short video released on Monday by the authorities in Belarus, Mr. Protasevich confessed — under duress, his friends say — to taking part in the organization of “mass unrest” last year in Minsk, the Belarus capital. That is the government’s term for weeks of huge street protests after Mr. Lukashenko, in power since 1994, declared a landslide re-election victory in an August election widely dismissed as brazenly rigged.

 

Stispan Putsila, the fellow dissident who described the atmosphere around Mr. Protasevich and the co-founder of opposition social media channels that Mr. Protasevich used last year to help mobilize street protests, said he had spoken to his friend and colleague before his departure for Greece about the potential risks.

 

They agreed, he said, that it was best to avoid flying over Belarus, Russia or any other state that cooperated with Mr. Lukashenko, but that flights between two European Union countries, Lithuania and Greece, should be safe.

He added that Mr. Protasevich might not have realized that the Ryanair flight he boarded in Athens on Sunday morning would fly over the western edge of Belarus, a route that opened the way for Mr. Lukashenko to carry out what European leaders condemned as a “state-sponsored hijacking.”

That something was amiss became clear at the airport in Athens, when Mr. Protasevich noticed a man he assumed to be a Belarus security agent trying to take photographs of him and his travel documents at the check-in counter.

 

Taking fright, however, was not in his character, Mr. Putsila said in an interview at the office of Nexta, the opposition news organization where Mr. Protasevich established himself as one of Mr. Lukashenko’s most effective and unbending critics.

 

“By his character Roman has always been very resolute,” Mr. Putsila said. “He refused to live in fear.”

Since Mr. Lukashenko took power in Belarus in 1994, however, that has been a very perilous proposition.

Mr. Protasevich has been resisting his country’s tyranny since he was 16, when he first witnessed what he described as the “disgusting” brutality of Mr. Lukashenko’s rule. That began a personal journey that would turn a gifted student at a science high school in Minsk into an avowed enemy of a government that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 called “the last remaining true dictatorship in the heart of Europe.”

 

Mr. Protasevich was raised in an outlying district of Minsk in one of the city’s anonymous, concrete high-rises by a father who was a military officer and a mother who taught math at an army academy. He studied at a prestigious high school and won an award in a Russian science contest.

But in the summer after 10th grade, Mr. Protasevich was detained by the police while sitting on a park bench with a friend watching a so-called “clapping protest,” when a flash mob clapped to show opposition to the government, without actually uttering any forbidden statements. Mr. Protasevich was just watching, Natalia Protasevich, his mother, said in an interview.

 

“For the first time I saw all the dirt that is happening in our country,” he said in a 2011 video posted on YouTube . “Just as an example: Five huge OMON riot police officers beat women. A mother with her child was thrown into a police van. It was disgusting. After that everything changed fundamentally.”

A letter from the security services to his high school followed. He was expelled and home educated for six months, as no other school would take him, his mother said.

The family eventually negotiated a deal with the Ministry of Education. Mr. Protasevich could attend school, though only an ordinary one, not the elite lyceum he had been enrolled in before, but only if his mother resigned from her teaching job at the army academy.

“Imagine being a 16-year-old and being expelled from school,” Ms. Protasevich said. “It was this incident, this injustice, this insult,” that drove him into the political opposition, she said. “That is how he began his activism as a 16-year-old.”

Mr. Protasevich studied journalism at Belarusian State University but again ran into trouble with the authorities. Unable to finish his degree, he worked as a freelance reporter for a variety of opposition-leaning publications. Frequently detained and jailed for short periods, he decided to move to Poland, working for 10 months in Warsaw with Mr. Putsila and others on the Nexta team disseminating videos, leaked documents and news reports critical of Mr. Lukashenko.

Convinced that his work would have more impact if he were inside Belarus, Mr. Protasevich returned in 2019 to Minsk. But the political climate had only darkened there as Mr. Lukashenko geared up for a presidential election in 2020.

 

In November 2019, the police in Belarus detained a fellow dissident journalist, Vladimir Chudentsov, on what were denounced as trumped up drug charges as he was trying to cross the border into Poland. 

2019년 11월, 반체제 동료 기자인 Vladimir Chudentsov 씨는 벨라루스 경찰에 의해 날조된 마약 혐의로 국경을 넘어 폴란드로 입국하던 중 체포 되었으며, 해당 사건으로 벨라루스 경찰당국은 맹렬한 비난을 받았다. 

 

Sensing serious trouble ahead, Mr. Protasevich decided to flee. On short notice, carrying only a backpack, according to his mother, he again left for Poland, Belarus’s western neighbor with a large population of exiles who had fled Mr. Lukashenko’s rule. 

이것이 앞으로 심각한 문제를 야기할 것이라는 것을 본능적으로 눈치챈 Protasevich 씨는 도주를 결심했다. 그의 어머니에 의하면 그는 곧바로 가방 하나만 들고, Lukashenko 대통령의 통치를 피해 망명한 사람들이 많은 벨라루스의 서쪽에 위치한 이웃 국가인 폴란드로 떠났다.

 

His parents followed him there last summer to avoid arrest after security agents pressured neighbors to speak with the parents about encouraging their son to return to Belarus, where he faced certain detention.

부모 또한 지난 여름 체포를 피하기 위해 그를 따라 폴란드로 이동했는데, 이는 그의 Protasevich 씨를 구금한 벨라루스 당국의 보안 요원들이 이웃들에게 그의 부모로 하여금 아들을 본국으로 돌아오도록 설득할 것을 압박하기 시작했기 때문이다. 

 

Mr. Protasevich stayed put in Warsaw, becoming a key opposition figure along with Mr. Putsila at Nexta, posting regular reports on the social media site Telegram. Mr. Putsila described their work as “activist journalism,” but added that Mr. Lukashenko had left no space for traditional journalism by shutting down any outlet inside Belarus that did more than parrot the government line.

Protasevich는 바르샤바에 머물며 Nexta의 Putsila 씨와 함께 주요 야당 인물이되어 정기적으로 Telegram에 보도물을 게시했다. Putsila 씨는 자신들의 활동을 “행동주의 저널리즘” 이라 설명했지만, Lukashenko 대통령이 벨라루스내에 있는 정부의 입장만을 앵무새처럼 따라하는것 이상을 하는 언론사를 폐쇄 시킴으로써 종래의 저널리즘이 있을 곳을 없앴다고 덧붙였다.

 

Working from an apartment in central Warsaw near the Polish Parliament, Mr. Protasevich moved further away from traditional journalism after the disputed presidential election last August, taking an active role in organizing street protests through Nexta’s account on Telegram.

바르샤바 중심에 위치한 폴란드 의회 인근 아파트에서 근무하는 Protasevich 씨는 논란의 지난 8월 대통령 선거 이후, 종래의 저널리즘에서 멀어져 Nexta의 Telegram 계정을 통한 거리 시위를 조직하는 데 적극적인 역할을 맡아왔다.

 

“He was more interested in organizing street action” than disseminating news, recalled Mr. Putsila, who also goes by the name Stepan Svetlov, an alias. “I would not say he was more radical, but he definitely became more resolute.” Mr. Protasevich’s work crossed into the realm of political activism, not only reporting on the protests but also planning them. “We’re journalists, but we also have to do something else,” he said in an interview last year. “No one else is left. The opposition leaders are in prison,” Mr. Putsila said that Mr. Protasevich never advocated violence, only peaceful protests.

"그는 뉴스를 전파하는 것보다 거리 활동을 조직하는 데 더 관심이 있었습니다.”라고 Stepan Svetlov 라는 가명으로 활동하는 Putsila 씨는 회상했다. “저는 그가 더 급진주의자가 되었다기보단 확실히 더 단호해졌다고 말하고 싶습니다.” Protasevich 씨의 업무는 시위 보도 뿐만 아니라 시위를 계획하는 등 정치 활동의 영역으로 넘어갔다. 그는 “우리는 기자이지만, 하는 일이 여기에만 국한되어서는 안됩니다.” 라며 작년 인터뷰에서 이와같이 밝혔다. Putsila 씨는 “아무도 남지 않았습니다. 야당 인사들은 감옥에 수감되어 있습니다.” 라며, Protasevich 씨는 평화시위를 원했을 뿐 폭력을 옹호한 적은 없다고 주장했다. 

 

In September last year, Mr. Protasevich left Poland for neighboring Lithuania to join Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the principal opposition candidate in the August election who had been forced to flee. With Mr. Lukashenko’s other main rivals in detention, Ms. Tikhanovskaya had become the main voice of the Belarus opposition.

지난해 9월 Protasevich 씨는 폴란드를 떠나 인근 리투아니아로 건너가 8월 선거에서 강제 피난했던 Svetlana Tikhanovskaya 야당 후보와 합류했다. Lukashenko 대통령의 다른 주요 경쟁자들이 구금되면서, Tikhanovskaya 씨는 벨라루스 반대파의 주요 목소리가 되었다.

 

In November, prosecutors in Belarus formally charged Mr. Protasevich under a law that bans the organization of protests that violate “social order.” The security services also put him on a list of accused terrorists.

 

But Mr. Protasevich felt safe in the European Union, and even took to mocking the charges against him in his homeland.

“After the Belarusian government identified me as a terrorist, I received more congratulations than ever in my entire life for a birthday,” he told Nashe Nive, a Belarusian news site.

Mr. Putsila said he was stunned that Mr. Lukashenko would force a commercial airliner to land just to arrest a youthful critic but, with the benefit of hindsight, thinks the operation should not have come as a big surprise. The autocrat, he said, wanted to show that “we will reach you not only in Belarus but wherever you are. He has always tried to terrify.”

A measure of that was that when the plane was forced to land in Minsk on Sunday, Belarus security agents arrested not only Mr. Protasevich but Ms. Sapega, 23. Ms. Sapega, a law student at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, appeared to have been arrested over her association. She was not known to be a target in her own right. Her lawyer said Wednesday she would be jailed for at least two months and face a criminal trial.

 

A young woman who identified herself as Ms. Sapega, who had not been seen in public since her arrest, appeared in a video posted on Twitter on Tuesday by NTV, a state-controlled Russian television channel.

The woman said she had been on the same plane as Mr. Protasevich to Lithuania, where she said she served as an editor for the “Black Book of Belarus,” a Telegram channel that focuses on exposing police brutality and is banned by Belarus as an “extremist” organization. Clearly speaking under duress in Russian, she confessed to publishing the personal information of Interior Ministry officers, a criminal offense in Belarus.

Mr. Putsila noted that Nexta had received so many threatening letters and abusive phone calls that Polish police officers stand permanent guard on the stairwell leading to the office.

“The Lukashenko regime considers Roman one of its main enemies,” he said. “Maybe it is right.”

Another colleague, Ekaterina Yerusalimskaya, told the Tut.by news service that she and Mr. Protasevich once noticed a mysterious man tailing them in Poland, and reported it to the police. Still, Mr. Protasevich remained nonchalant. “He calmed himself by saying nobody would touch us, otherwise it would be an international scandal,” Ms. Yerusalimskaya said.

Mr. Protasevich’s mother said she worried about his safety but, breaking down in tears as she contemplated her son’s fate after his arrest in Minsk, added: “We believe justice will prevail. We believe all this terror will pass. We believe political prisoners will be freed. And we are very proud of our son.”