BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

16/11/2006

Raid Nixes Belarus Confab

By: DOUG IRELAND

The raid, which took place when police broke into the apartment in Gomel, a city of roughly half a million, came just 48 hours before the conference-whose theme was "Perspectives for the LGBT Movement in Politically Repressive Regimes"-was to open in the Belarusian capital of Minsk. The conference was co-sponsored by the TEMA Information Center-the national LGBT group in Belarus-and the Belarus section of Amnesty International. Significant conference materials and papers were seized by police during the raid. As a result of the police raid and harassment, the gay conference has now been postponed until sometime next spring. TEMA co-chair Tanya Ivanova cited "security reasons and threats to the personal safety of the participants" in explaining the postponement.

One of those arrested, TEMA's 21-year-old co-chair Svyatoslav ("Slava") Sementsov, said after his release that "four of my colleagues were released after two hours. I and two others spent the night behind bars, where we were interrogated-but we didn't experience violence or gay-bashing from police officers."

Sementsov told Gay City News that the other activists arrested were Vyacheslav Bortnik, 31, chair of Amnesty International-Belarus; Vyacheslav Andreev, 19, a student; Sviatlana Siarheichyk, 25, an executive in a perfume company; Tanya Ivanova, 23, co-chair of TEMA; Aleksei Filipenko, 35, a coiffeur; and Natalia Kavalchukm, 27, a medical doctor.

Formerly part of the Soviet Union, Belarus has been ruled with an iron fist since 1994 by President Alexander Lukashenko, and is frequently referred to as "the last dictatorship in Eastern Europe." Lukashenko has accused the European Union and the U.S. of "spreading sexual perversion here," and the media his regime controls have tried to smear the democratic political opposition by associating it with homosexuality. Elections in Belarus are regularly rigged by Lukashenko's regime-including the last presidential election in March of this year, in a fraud which provoked large public demonstrations by the opposition-and the dictator's political adversaries have frequently been arrested, beaten, and sometimes murdered. Police regularly use excessive force, mass detentions, and long-term imprisonment against political dissidents. Belarus has been expelled from the Council of Europe, the longstanding body that in 1950 created the European Convention on Human Rights, for violations of democratic norms.

The first-and only-Gay Pride march in Belarus was held in Minsk in 2001 with some 300 participants, but in subsequent years any attempts to hold such events have been suppressed by the authorities. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in 1994 following Belarus' independence from the former Soviet Union, in the last public opinion poll on the subject, taken in April 2002, 47 percent of Belarusians said that all homosexuals should be imprisoned. The strong influence of the notoriously homophobic Russian Orthodox Church on day-to-day life in Belarus is critical in encouraging such attitudes.

In this context, any attempt at gay organizing in Belarus is extremely courageous-all the more so because a December 2005 revision of the country's Criminal Code made activities on behalf of illegal associations a crime punishable by six months in prison, with "serious cases" punishable by "restriction of freedom" for two years. All attempts to register LGBT groups legally have been refused, so TEMA is officially illegal.

Similar penalties are imposed on those who provide "false information" to "foreign countries or organizations," making it very hazardous for gay groups to have contact with the international LGBT movement, as their activists could be prosecuted under these vague and arbitrarily-implemented laws.

"I still believe that one day, LGBT people will win in Belarus, and will do all my best to help achieve that," TEMA co-chair Sementsov told Gay City News following his release from jail.

"I was born in Gomel, but when I was only one year old, my family left for Kazakhstan, where I lived until I was 16," Sementsov related, adding, "I have a master's degree in law. At university I became an activist with Amnesty International, and in 2004 I was one of the co-founders of TEMA. In 2005 I was also one of the founders of the organization Vstrecha, which works on preventing HIV/AIDS among LGBT people."

Sementsov said that the only attempt to have a gay publication in Belarus "was the magazine Forum Lambda, but it was closed down by the authorities in 2002," and there has been nothing since to take its place. He added that, "90 percent of media here are state-owned, and their usual rule about discussing homosexuality is 'don't ask, don't tell'-but when they do discuss homosexuality, they say that 'all gays are pedophiles,' or 'this is not normal behavior for the Belarus nation,' or 'this behavior is coming from the West.' And in the educational system, homosexuality is completely taboo, even at university level."

Gay-bashing, Sementsov noted, is a widespread and frequent phenomenon-and murders of suspected gay men are not uncommon. Such incidents are almost never punished by the police and authorities.

Sementsov described a "tenuous, semi-safe" gay nightlife in Minsk, "with an underground network of rotating gay nights at bars and clubs. There is no valid gay subculture to which one can belong. Nowadays, news spreads in the Minsk gay community through e-mail and word-of-mouth about which bars and clubs are gay-friendly on which nights. Club owners realize they can make money by catering to gay patrons, but they cannot afford the stigma of remaining exclusively gay. Sometimes, surreptitiously-circulated flyers will allow cheaper admissions to some clubs and bars on quasi-official gay nights."

According to Sementsov, a club that attempted to function as openly gay, "called Oscar, was shut down by the government because, the authorities said, it attracted a 'socially dysfunctional clientele.'"

In a July 18 interview with GayRussia.ru, self-described gay activist and Amnesty-Belarus chair Bortnik-who, with TEMA co-chair Sementsov, marched in London's EuroPride Parade in June this year carrying a Belarus flag-said that it is "absolutely impossible" for a gay male couple to live together in Belarus, adding: "Most gays and lesbian in Belarus live in registered [heterosexual] marriage. In many cases spouses don't know about the sexual orientation of their partners. As for me, I have been married to a girl from 2000 through 2004. It was a fake marriage, but nobody in my town can say that I'm not a real man."

Sementsov said that TEMA needs gay educational and resource materials "and, of course, money." Anyone wishing to help TEMA can contact Sementsov at svyatoslav.sementsov@gmail.com.

Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/direland/.

Source:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17476066&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=569346&rfi=6

Google