Updated at 17:53,27-03-2024

Zmitser Dashkevich: I feel these 9 months were like 9 years in salt mines

charter97.org

The political prisoner needs his knee to be operated. He has written about that in his letter to his godmother Natallya Yasevich.

In his another letter from prison the Young Front leader Zmitser Dashkevich tells about the danger he faces. He calls the last 9 months behind the bars the most difficult in his life. For the first time the political prisoner mentions he want to demand a knee surgery.

"Now I am in my new cantonment area. I do not know what to expect here, but anyway it’s no fun. I put my trust in God only, He will free me from here. I dream about that so fervently! I dream about our meeting! About our sitting around a table, near a bonfire, with shashliks a in our garden!" Dashkevich writes. "I do not know whether I had been writing that before: you are mentioned in my personal file. It means that you are entitled to visit me like a member of my family, for a short and even long period of time. That’s possible in the deplorable situation if I continue to stay in the penal colony.

By the way, I am going to write a petition and ask for a knee surgery, I have problems with meniscus. They have to take me to Minsk for that, to Valadarski Street, where the prison hospital is situated now. Previously it was situated in Kalvaryjskaya Street. However, I am praying with all my might to break away from here and to see all of you at large… I do not need anything else to be happy, only to be by your side, all of you… And I am feeling that I will not endure without you long… My force is leaving me… I feel there is no beginning and no end to this nightmare I have been living in for the last months. Looking back I cannot understand how I could overcome all that, and it is even more difficult to understand how can I go on enduring all that?.. Pray for me, my dear, for me to be returned to you… I cannot live in a different way… These 9 years were like 9 years of salt mines for me. Shklou was nothing as compared to what I hade to come through and still come through now. Can you imagine my spiritual state now? I cannot imagine it myself. I am thinking about all that, and my head is splitting, in all senses… Well, it’s enough tormenting you by my pain…"


We remind the Young Front leader is behind the bars since late December 2010. He was sentenced to 2 years in a penal colony for alleged "hooliganism".