Simply disappeared: In Switzerland, a former member of a Belarusian special unit is on trial for the first time, who is said to have kidnapped and killed three opposition members on behalf of the regime.
“Then we went home and slept.” It is a shockingly banal sentence with which Juri Garawski ends the description of his mission on September 16, 1999. As a member of a special unit of the Belarusian Interior Ministry, he said he was involved in the kidnapping and murder of two opponents of the regime that day.
The defendant reported in court that the politician Viktor Gonchar and the businessman Anatoly Krassovsky were kidnapped after visiting a sauna in Minsk and then executed with two shots each in the heart.
Officially, her fate remains unknown to this day. They disappeared. Just like another opposition figure, former Interior Minister Yuri Sakharenko, a few months earlier. He was also kidnapped and murdered by the special forces of the regime of ruler Alexander Lukashenko.
“Not with an apology to make amends”
Zakharenko’s daughter Alena was 23 years old when her father disappeared. A request for an apology, which the defendant had read out by the court interpreter, leaves her cold: “He is locked in a cage like an animal. There is no acceptance of an apology on my part.”
Her life is destroyed, her suffering is “chronic.” You can’t make up for that with the simple word “sorry”: “That’s in my heart, my soul.”
She has been waiting for this process for 24 years, says Alena. The Geneva-based non-governmental organization Trial International brought the case to the Swiss court together with the Viasna human rights center from Belarus. The so-called universal legal principle applies to serious human rights violations: they can be prosecuted anywhere in the world.
Historical process
Switzerland has joined the UN Convention on the Protection of All People from Enforced Disappearances and added a corresponding paragraph to the Criminal Code.
The trial in St. Gallen is a historic trial, says lawyer Benoit Meystre from Trial International: “For the first time a court is discussing the crimes committed in Belarus.” It’s about the responsibility of the state right up to the ruler Lukashenko. “And it is the moment when the families of the victims, as co-plaintiffs, get answers about what happened to their fathers.”
Descriptions “coherent and plausible”
The St. Gallen judge persistently questioned the alleged Lukashenko henchman Garawski and repeatedly confronted the Belarusian, who fled to Switzerland in 2018, with contradictions in his statements to asylum authorities, the public prosecutor’s office and in court.
The public prosecutor also spoke of an “ambivalent impression,” but called the descriptions of the kidnappings and murders coherent and plausible. Only a perpetrator could have known this.
The public prosecutor requested a prison sentence of three years. In addition, the lawyer for the daughters of the murdered women demanded damages of 200,000 francs each. The criminal state of Belarus took their father away from them and left them in the dark about his fate for decades.