BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

13/10/2005

Belarus: peaceful 'Day of Solidarity' with the families and friends of the missing persons

/noticias.info/ The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly's Sub-Committee on Human Rights, meeting in Geneva today, invited its Chairman, Christos Pourgourides (Cyprus, EPP/CD) to express its full support for the peaceful "Day of Solidarity" with the families and friends of four missing opposition activists and journalists: Yuri Zakharenko, Victor Gonchar, Anatoly Krasovski and Dmitri Zavadski. Grassroots initiatives such as "We Remember", "We Want to Know the Truth", "Free Belarus", and "Zubr" are calling on citizens in Belarus to show their solidarity by switching off their lights on Sunday 16 October at 8 pm and to place a candle in their window.

Christos Pourgourides cites journalist Irina Khalip: "We shall all light candles, think, pray for the disappeared, political prisoners and their families. We are to imagine the Belarus in which we could live. Maybe everything would start with that. Dark cities, dark windows, where only burning candles are seen. This could become a mirror for us to see that we are many,"

He stresses that the Sub-Committee is dismayed that the Assembly's strong call in Resolution 1371 (2004), based on Mr Pourgourides' own findings as the Assembly's Rapporteur, to hold certain senior Belarusian officials - the former Head of the Presidential Administration and Prosecutor General Sheyman, former Interior Minister Sivakov, and Special Forces Colonel Pavlichenko - criminally responsible for masterminding these high-profile disappearances, has still not been answered by the Lukashenko regime in Belarus.

Source:

http://www.noticias.info/asp/aspComunicados.asp?nid=108105&src=0