“Tell the Truth!” to tell about “Authorities in jail”

Another project of the “Tell the Truth” campaign has an intriguing name – “Authorities in jail”. Activists of the campaign are going to collect information about officials imprisoned for corruption. However, the coordinator of the project Tatstsyana Protska has informed ERB that the goal of the campaign is not collecting information about officials’ crimes connected with corruption but trying to find out whether all the imprisoned were in fact corrupt.

Tatstsyana Protska: “We often hear people blaming officials. However: are people ruling our country in fact criminals or is something wrong with it? We saw that officials’ life was not that easy when we started working on the project. The project was developed and it is called “Authorities in jail” now.

The head of the project Alyaksandr Fyaduta joined the presentation from Stasbourg by Skype. He reminded that promises to fight corruption had helped Lukashenka win presidential elections for the first time.

Alyaksandr Fyaduta: “However, it turned out later that corruption remained and the struggle with corruption turned into a reason for fighting certain officials and heads the state leader considered disagreeable”.



Fyaduta admitted that there were bribers and those who committed economic crimes among the imprisoned officials. However, he says that not only those people got imprisoned. The campaign’s new project is supposed to demonstrate the fate of the Belarusian nomenclature during Lukashenka’s rule with the help of certain examples.

“Tell the Truth!” has created a special website to make the process of information collection easier. According to the head of the website Alina Hlyamenka, the web page is created not only for information about the topic, it can be used by officials, their relatives and friends who may like to express their resentment.




There are stories of imprisoned officials on the website. An activist of the campaign Ihar Drako collected them.

Ihar Drako: “We have included so-called V.I.P. stories in the first part. They are about the people who spent a long time in jail or spent a few months in a detention centre and were released after a trial. The stories were well-known. There were also people who worked in the Presidents’ Administration, who were deputies. And then they disappeared. And there was no more information about them”.

The former Minister of Agriculture Vasil Layvonau joined the presentation on the Internet. He assured that he had been punished for political disagreement instead of corruption.

Vasil Layvonau: “Considering the reason why I was imprisoned it becomes evident that it happened due to political disagreement. It is a struggle against those who think different”.
ERB has asked the head of the project Alyaksandr Fyaduta whether Nyaklyayeu’s adherents are going to attract officials to their side with the help of the project.

Alyaksandr Fyaduta: “I would put is more precisely – we would like to remind officials about their fate if Lukashenka’s rule continues. Our project is meant to explain that the enemy of officials’ class is not the personality but the system. They have to destroy this system. And only officials are able to do it”.

Fyaduta thinks that an opportunity to share their version of the events has to be given to corrupt officials too. He is sure that the website will be in demand even after the elections regardless of their result.