Can everyone hear me?
So good evening and welcome or welcome back to the ballet.
I don't know how many of you have been taking part in this whole weekend, the way some of us have.
I am delighted that you're all here to share this exciting film, Dangerous Acts.
I know that for those of us within the committee that selected this film,
it was really eye-opening, politically and creatively very inspiring.
My name is Hollis Kerman.
I am a member of the Netherlands Committee of Human Rights Watch
and also the chairperson of this whole human rights weekend event.
And it's been very exciting.
So I hope that you'll be as excited and informed as we were this evening.
And we have with us tonight, for those of you who were here for the Pussy Riot happening last night,
you've already seen Rachel Denber, but I can think of nobody better to introduce this film
and to place it in a context for us tonight than Rachel.
She is the deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia Division for Human Rights Watch
and is a deep, long-standing expert in this area,
the countries and regions that were formerly the Soviet Union,
and at one time was also heading up Human Rights Watch's Moscow office.
So I think that it will be wonderful to hear her try and put this in context.
I think that the situation of a dictatorship so close to home to stick to our theme in Belarus,
the one that you never hear about, that nobody seems to know anything about, talk about.
And I think after this evening we will feel quite differently.
So let me ask Rachel Denber, please, to come up.
One thing I do want to ask you all, at the end of the film,
I will be interviewing the director who couldn't be with us here tonight, but by Skype, Madeline Sackler.
So please do today seat it.
I think it will be very, very interesting to hear what she has to say about the film,
and we will, of course, then open up to the audience for questions.
Sorry, Rachel.
Enjoy.
Hi, good evening.
It's great to see everybody, and maybe see everybody again,
if many of you were here last night for the Pussy Riot event.
This movie, Dangerous Acts, is here at the festival at a very, very timely moment.
And it didn't, Donna, I didn't realize just how timely this screening was,
until just this morning, when I was thinking about what I might say today about Belarus,
I realized that this is 2014, right?
That we're in the year 2014.
And so it's now 20 years since Alexander Lukashenko.
Picture, please.
Okay.
Since Alexander Lukashenko has been president of Belarus,
it's the 20-year anniversary of his rule starting in March.
And I think that I have, I've been, I'm probably one of the few people at Human Rights Watch
who has been there long enough to, and I've been at Human Rights Watch for 22 years, so
longer than Lukashenko.
So I'm probably one of the few people who can actually remember what Belarus was like
before Alexander Lukashenko took over.
And I can remember how it was that he built the dictatorship that is ruling Belarus today.
Belarus wasn't always the last dictatorship in Europe.
It became that way in a very specific way after, there he is, after Lukashenko came
to power.
He set, he lost no time, and within, within three years, Belarus, he had totally eviscerated
the, the, the free press.
He had turned the parliament into a, into a meaningless institution, into a rubber-stamp
parliament.
He insured presidential control over the judiciary.
He went after NGOs, non-governmental organizations, handing down, there were new laws to very
tightly regulate NGO activity, and there were new laws even to make it a crime to be involved
in NGO activity if it was not registered, and of course you can't get registered.
And he also lost no time in, in exercising extensive state control over lawyers.
So all of this, all of this meant a wide net of state control over just about every political
and social institution.
And then against, and then against that backdrop, such, such things like, I won't even talk
about mass protests, but even single-person pickets, you know, when one person stands
up with a sign and says, you know, free this person or free that person, that kind of thing
is not tolerated.
You are swiftly taken away by the police when there are larger demonstrations, they're busted
up by police, often quite violently.
I think that Belarus has wrongly gotten the reputation among many people in the former
Soviet space as, as a kind of a place of nostalgia for the old Soviet days.
People who, people who are very nostalgic about the old Soviet days, they look at Belarus
and they say, oh, look how calm it is, look how wonderful it is, and they're, you know,
it's a worker's paradise just like in the Soviet days.
Let me assure you that that is not the case.
I can tell you that, that, that there are, the worker's rights don't exist in, in Belarus,
that the trade unions have been completely busted, that students who are supposed to
be getting this free, free higher education, it's not free.
When you finish university, you have to go and work on a job that the government tells
you you have to do, and, you know, living in conditions that are absolutely squalid.
I can tell you also that the government now continues to treat people who are dependent
on drugs and alcohol, so people of alcohol, drug addictions, not unlike in China, they
round them up, they put them in, basically in a custodial situation, right, so where
you're in forced isolation and you're forced to work and you're forced to get treatment.
So if you're nostalgic, if you're nostalgic about the Soviet days, then you'll definitely
be nostalgic about things like that.
Well, so then what happens?
So in this kind of very, very, very inflexible, brittle authoritarian regime, there are still
independent voices, and that is what I find most inspiring, that despite all of this pressure,
there are still a couple of groups that have defiantly continued to operate, and there
are still some independent journalists that even though they can't broadcast on TV, even
though no printing press in Belarus would ever print anything they would write, they
still try to get the word out outside Belarus about what's happening inside the country,
and they are a real inspiration.
And in response to this big crackdown that's been underway for 20 years now, the European
Union has put sanctions, targeted sanctions on government officials in Belarus that forbids
them certain officials from travelling in the European Union that freezes their assets
if they have any.
Of course the government does not like these sanctions, and at one point they even several
years ago decided that they needed to make some concessions because they wanted the sanctions
to go away.
So they started a very slight thaw, and that thaw gave rise to some hopes that when presidential
elections came in 2010, so about three years ago, that because Lukashenko really wanted
the sanctions to go away permanently, there was some hope that he would allow a real election,
a real fair and free election, and there were multiple candidates, there were actual debates
on TV, I was shocked, I couldn't believe it, after so many years of total government censorship
there were actually debates on television, I couldn't believe it.
And I think that this was done to try to, because the government wanted to have some
kind of a relationship with the European Union, they were getting tired of the isolation, and
I think that the government was also getting a little bit anxious about having two dependent
a relationship on Russia.
So what was the effect of all of that?
The effect was it got people's hopes up, and I think that a lot of people in Belarus thought
in 2010 that they really would have a free and fair election, and then what happened
was it became clear that the election would be stolen despite the fact that there were
seven other candidates, and there was a big demonstration, and maybe some of you remember
this, there was a big demonstration on election night to protest election fraud, and that demonstration
was mercilessly, violently dispersed by police, with their billy clubs beating everybody
in sight, 700 people were arrested, most of them were released after a couple of weeks,
after some really terrible times in prison, and every, all of the opposition presidential
candidates were arrested, every single one of them.
And that started a new period of chill, a new higher level of oppression in Belarus that
has not led up to this day.
Right now there are still at least 11 political prisoners in Belarus, and I want to tell you
about one of them who means a lot to me.
I wish we had a picture of him.
The country's one of the country's top human rights defenders, and actually someone who
has an international profile, his name is Alias Beliatsky, I've known Alias for more
than 20 years.
I remember doing advocacy together with him in Geneva at the UN, trying to get a resolution
adopted on Belarus, and a special UN expert assigned to Belarus, I remember going from
meeting to meeting with Alias and being so impressed with his courage, and his eloquence,
and his charm.
And five months later, Alias was in prison, he was arrested on ridiculous charges of tax
evasion, and right now as we speak he is halfway through a four and a half year prison sentence.
And he's, you know, we've, yesterday and you got to meet, many of you got to meet Pussy Riot,
they are certainly profiles encouraged, they're very well known, they're international celebrities.
When you go home tonight, Google Alias Beliatsky, read the letters that he has written that
have been published, the letters that he's written to his wife and to his children, letters
from prison, this is a man who should never have been behind bars, every single day that
he's there is a day of injustice, and I think that all of this sets the context for just
what a creepy place Belarus is, if you want to travel in time and go back to the Soviet
Union, then you can go to, you should go to Belarus.
And when you watch Dangerous Acts, that's the context that you need to keep in mind,
because these, it's a fantastic film, and these, this theater troupe is, they're extremely
creative to be doing what they're doing in such a stifling environment.
But let's be inspired by them, let's be inspired by their creativity, not just their courage,
but their creativity, and also their humanity, the fact that even though they live in an
absolutely oppressive situation, they're still, they will not let go of their, just their
human spirit.
So enjoy the film.
And thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Even when none of us knew what would be happening next, it was possible to make art out of it
an absolutely horrible year.
I believe it helps us to survive as human beings.
I believe it helps us to survive as human beings, as human beings, as human beings.
And I believe it helps us to survive as human beings.
And I believe it helps us to survive as human beings.
