Country reports
This is a story about the elections and, in particular, of the day and night of December 19, when the citizens’ peaceful demonstration against falsified elections was brutally suppressed by the police. The novel presents two views on the developments in parallel. The first one shows how the events are interpreted by the state regime and currently widely publicized by state-run newspapers and television. The other version was assembled from information presented by independent media, which for the most part can exist only in the Internet, i.e. blogs, oppositional websites, users’ comments, testimonies of victims and political activists.
The situation in Belarus is portrayed by the novel in the status as of mid January 2011. Now, two months after the opposition crackdown in Belarus, the greater part of several hundreds of arrested citizens is already released. However, the wave of political repressions continues: throughout the country, offices of democratic parties and NGOs get searched, opposition activists and just ordinary citizens, who came to express their political opinion in the Square on December 19, are called in question by the police and KGB. Over 50 people, several former presidential candidates and opposition party leaders among them, are either incriminated or suspected of being responsible for the December 19 Cause. They remain either imprisoned or bound by house arrest or bail conditions; many of them are facing a criminal sentence of up to 15 years in jail.
Please help raising public awareness about the ongoing violations of human rights in Belarus! Stay solidary with the Belarusian civil society and urge for an immediate termination of political repressions in this country!
The author of the project is Marina Naprushkina, 29, a Berlin-based political artist and activist. Ms. Naprushkina was born and grew up in Minsk, Belarus; she received arts education at Minsk Arts School named after A.Hlebau and Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Ms. Naprushkina works in various media, including painting, video, and installation. “The Office for Anti-Propaganda” is her main project. It is devoted to analyzing mechanisms of political propaganda. This critical study is focused on the authoritarian regime of today’s Belarus.
Marina Naprushkina designed the graphic novel “The Convincing Victory: two stories on what really happened” with help of Olga Kopenkina, Yana Saturn, and Tobias Weihmann.
The graphic novel is available in English and Russian.
