Political Prisoner Mikalay Autukhovich Released
- 18.01.2008, 17:33
The level of restriction has been changed for corrective labour to the political prisoner and small businessman Mikalay Autukhovich. Mikalay Autukhovich has informed about that in an interview to the Charter’97 press-center. He has already left for his home town of Vaukavysk from Minsk.
“The measure of restraint has been changed for corrective labour for me. I shall live at home. On Monday I shall register at the police department of Vaukavysk. I do not know yet what work I shall perform,” Mikalay Autukhovich said.
As said by Autukhovich, in October the commission on early conditional release refused to mitigate the sentence for him. But yesterday evening he was unexpectedly invited to the head of the prisoner party. He was to sign some papers, but nobody explained anything to him. Only in the morning a judge and a prosecutor arrived to the colony. Autukhovich was told that he was released from the colony.
Autukhovich does not know how to explain his sudden release still. “I thought that many political prisoners are at large. And now it turns out that I am alone who has been released. Maybe somebody will be released tomorrow? Or on Monday? Everything is possible,” he said.
Recalling the 2.5 years spent in the colony, Autukhovich said:
“Prison is a place where nobody cares about anybody. If you keep a low profile, nobody would pester you. I tried to be invisible, I communicated with my circle and spoke Belarusian… I was determined to stay in prison the full term”.
Over the years spent in prison, Autukhovich has never been allowed to have an additional meeting with relatives or additional parcel. “When the end of the term was near, members of the “inter-parliamentary” commission offered conditions to better my lot. I didn’t accept them. Pressure was no permanent. But the labour in the colony is a slave labour. I was paid a little more then 2,000 BYR for 26 working-days as a carpenter,” Autukhovich said.
As for his health condition, the former political prisoner says that it has considerably improved.
“I should improve my health. I feel consequences of long hunger-strikes. I have developed pancreatitis,” he notes.
Today the businessman returns to his home town Vaukavysk. “I do not have my business as such. It has been ruined. I am not going to forgive that to anybody. But to restart business in our country today is stupid. They can seize everything again and imprison you,” he said.
As we have informed, the entrepreneur was arrested on October 14, 2005 and sentenced to 3.5 years of imprisonment in a maximum security colony for a false accusation of tax evasion. He was imprisoned in a remand prison and from the first day of arrest was on hunger strike which lasted 74 (!) days. M. Autukhovich served a sentence in the colony No. 1 of Minsk.
It was the regime who defined Autukhovich “a political prisoner”. When he was put on the wanted list, it was written in the documents that “M. Autukhovich has a negative attitude towards the existing political regime and the head of the state”.