Our family ripped apart by Europe's last dictator says Iryna Khalip, wife of jailed Andrei Sannikov in Belarus

Iryna Khalip, wife of Andrei Sannikov, the jailed opposition leader of
Belarus, has described how her husband only 'confessed' after threats to
kill her and her son.

By Andrew Osborn, in Minsk

8:00AM BST 12 Jun 2011

Wife of the country's leading opposition figure, a courageous journalist, and
mother to a young son, she always knew that Belarus's
neo-Soviet regime was vicious. But she had not expected it to target
her family for destruction in even her worst nightmares.

Belarus was after all part of Europe, a mere two-and-a-half hour flight from
London, and this was the second decade of the 21st century not the dark days
of Stalin's Soviet Union.

It was true that she had written her fair share of hard-hitting articles for a
newspaper in neighbouring Russia pouring scorn on Alexander Lukashenko,
Belarus's dictatorial president.

It was true too that her husband, Andrei Sannikov, had resigned from his plum
post as deputy foreign minister to help found a pro-democracy rights group,
then had the nerve to challenge Mr Lukashenko in last December's
presidential election.

But in a country that resembles a Soviet version of The Stepford Wives circa
1950 such defiance was usually punished by briefly jailing or beating the
guilty party, but not by going after an entire family.

Yet as she stood in a grim courtroom several weeks ago, Miss Khalip realised
that the regime had decided to make a terrifying exception in her own case.

Two days earlier, her husband had been jailed for five years after being
forced to falsely say that he had organised a violent protest against the
regime.

She says he was assaulted and then jailed as he took part in a peaceful
protest. "The riot police beat my husband around the head and on his
legs so hard that he fell to the ground. When he fell, a riot policeman
lifted his metal riot shield above him and with all his might brought it
down on his knees,'' she said. "After that, he could not walk."

The KGB secret police, which has kept its Soviet-era name, told her husband
that she and their young son, Daniil, four, would be killed if he did not
confess to his alleged crimes.

As she stood in the dock, and heard the judge give her a two-year suspended
jail sentence banning her from leaving Minsk, she said she felt like the
family unit she had been carefully building for a decade was being
dismantled piece by piece.

"It was terrifying," she said in her first interview with a Western
newspaper since her ordeal. "I knew they were preparing a crackdown but
I never imagined it would be so harsh."

The nature of her own sentence, ostensibly for disrupting public order by
taking part in an opposition protest, means she remains at the regime's
mercy. "I will be tried again in two years' time and there is a 50-50
chance that they will send me to jail. They have set things up so that this
will always be hanging over me, so that I cannot forget."

Her husband is due to stay in jail for the next five years, and though she
said his spirits were high, she said he had been tortured. "They forced
him to run up and down metal stairs clutching his mattress and all his
bedding to his chest, and they forced him and others to stand naked for long
periods until they dropped. My husband is 57 years old."

Although Belarus, a small country of 10 million people that borders Poland,
has been ruled increasingly harshly by the tyrannical Mr Lukashenko since
1994, her family's ordeal began last December.

Mr Lukashenko, the former manager of a Soviet collective farm who has been
quoted praising Adolf Hitler, was up for re-election for a fourth term.

Never mind that the self-styled father, or ''Batka'', of the nation was
supposed to have stepped down long ago. The balding autocrat had changed the
constitution in a rigged referendum to get around that one. Nobody doubted
that he would fix this election too, and so it was that Western observers
duly declared that his "victory", with almost 80 per cent of the
vote, was "flawed."

When Miss Khalip and her husband took to the streets with thousands of others
to protest, trouble flared. Unidentified men she believes were regime
provocateurs attacked the main government building in Minsk, giving the riot
police the perfect pretext to pounce and Mr Lukashenko the ammunition he
needed to claim the opposition was mounting a coup. It was, she said, a
set-up. The building was barricaded from the inside and was filled with riot
police wearing body armour. "It was all planned in advance," she
said. As she watched in horror, her husband was brutally assaulted. With the
help of friends, she got him into a car and set off for the hospital. On
route, she began giving an interview to a Russian radio station, but did not
get very far. A phalanx of police cars boxed them in like something out of a
Hollywood film and dragged the couple out.

"The radio station told me to stay on the line for as long as I could and
I did, but a policemen punched me in the face when I refused to give up my
phone."

Doctors on the scene insisted that her husband needed urgent medical care and
he was bundled into an ambulance. But the ambulance took him straight to a
KGB cell instead. Miss Khalip was not allowed any contact with him for the
next five months, and she herself spent the next month and a half in jail.
At one point, she was in a cell next to her husband but never knew it.

While she was in jail the authorities tried to put her son in a home. Her
mother, Lutsina, 74, who was looking after Daniil, suffered a heart attack
at the time but somehow found the strength to collect the necessary
documents needed to win legal guardianship.

Blonde and articulate, Miss Khalip, 43, shudders as she remembers how close
she came to losing her son. "I still have a dream that I am in a prison
behind a see-through soundproof wall and that I watch as they take away my
son but cannot do anything about it."

Worst of all though, she added, was the effect on her son. "Everyone
thinks that kids don't understand adult conversations but that's not right.
He asked my mum what she would do if the bad guys asked her to hand him over
to them and she said she would say no."

When Miss Khalip got out of jail she faced another ordeal: house arrest. For
three and a half months, she was not allowed to leave her flat or even
approach the windows and had two KGB agents living with her around the
clock. The KGB replaced the agents every eight hours.

"I joked that they'd have to shoot me because I knew all their faces, but
worst of all was that my son also became a prisoner. I'd be sleeping with my
son and they'd be watching TV in the next room, and every time I wanted to
use the bathroom in my own home I'd have to get dressed. Psychologically, it
was worse than prison." She struggled to explain the situation to her
son. "He did not understand why his mum couldn't go out for a walk with
him. I had to lie and say that I was ill and that the doctor had forbade me
from going out. He didn't understand who all the men in our apartment were
either. Again, I had to lie and say that some bad men had attacked me and
these good men were there to protect me."

What was harder though, she said, was to explain where his father was. "I
told him he was away on a trip and would be back very soon."

A court has allowed her to see her husband twice in the last month and they
are now able to exchange letters. As she ate lunch in a restaurant that on
the surface could be anywhere in Europe, she seemed, understandably, deeply
disturbed. "I am not my old self and have been operating on autopilot,"
she conceded.

But amid signs that the regime was beginning to unravel, she said she was
optimistic. The national currency has been devalued by almost 50 per cent,
there has been a run on certain goods. Popular discontent was growing, she
said.

"The balance of power has shifted. The authorities are more afraid of the
people than the other way round."

If the West boycotted Belarusian exports, she said, the regime would fall in a
single day. "I don't know when or how but I am convinced that my
husband will be released before his jail term is up. I don't believe the
regime will last another five years."