"It was always an option. I knew it existed. I never said - you can kill me but I will not do it. If they crossed the red lines, and red lines for me were my family, I couldn't take the risk. I knew the nature of these people and I knew they are not lying when they are threatening to kill, to cripple or to do nasty things to your family. (....) The problem was that I had to write it twice, because when I wrote it while kept incommunicado, they tried to conceal it. Maybe they didn't like the language that I used, I don't remember now. But the time was passing and there was no reaction. And then I understood they have some other plans with me and I was scared. Not for myself, but for my family. It was clear I wrote this clemency paper after they had threatened my family but I didn't hear any news and nothing was happening. They didn't admit anyone to meet me, even my lawyers were looking for me and couldn't find me for some time. I was kept alone in solitary cell, not allowed to to communicate to anybody, so I had to write it for a second time. And then, I was shouting. I was alone in my solitary cell, but there were other prisoners punished in similar cells. When I was handing over this paper in the morning, during the usual checking procedure, I was shouting that I wrote it. So that other people could hear. Because they were planning something very nasty."
"So we came to the square and started to speak and calling people to join us and we said that we wanted change. That was quite peaceful and we decided to go to the house of government, to another square, through the centre of Minsk.
We continued our rally with speeches, many people spoke. And then out of sudden somebody started to brake the windows in the house of government and the police appeared, dispersed the crowd…
People started to run away, because they were really very menacing, they were beating people, there was blood already. I was beaten also and was taken by my friend and my wife to the nearest car (offered by some friend journalists) and we started going to some… it was hospital, because I was beaten badly and I didn´t feel myself well and I wanted to ask for some help. We were stopped when we were on the Victory square, another square nearby which we lived, beaten again and arrested."
"We were prevented. They tried to create many obstacles but still there were possibilities to talk to people. For example, after I spoke in my university of foreign languages, they stopped this practice. They prohibited the opposition from speaking publicly at this university. Because they failed there. We were meeting a lot of people, we organized the signatures' collection very well and it was visible that out poles for signatures' collection were attracting people and there were lines. If Lukashenka people were nearby, they didn't have anybody. Our people were even feeding them, giving them hot coffee and tee. It was already late autumn, winter time. I used all the opportunities to speak to big audiences but also didn't neglect small audiences. I was travelling extensively and my team was travelling extensively. Look, I had two heads of state in my team, Shushkievich and Gryb. I had two generals, former minister of defence Kazlovski and general Frolov. They were travelling separately. I had people who were well known, journalists, the famous film director Khashchevadski, who made the first film criticizing Lukashenka in 1996. They were also travelling and campaigning for our team. I believe, this is why we managed to achieve high moments of expectations. And these expectations were felt in the society. This is why Lukashenka used force on the first day of the election, which he never did before."
"They did arrest Pavel Sheremet , who was a Belorusian journalist working for a Russian TV, and Dzmitry Zavadski at the border with Lithuania, where they were doing their reports on the wrongdoing of the Lukashenka. And we were discussing what could be done, not only to release the journalists, but also to organise the resistance towards this regime. And we came up with the idea of Charter 97. Because it was 97. It was 20 years after the Czechoslovakian Charter.
It was written in this very short declaration that this thought of communism is still alive in Central Europe and we want to deal with it. There were people from different political groups, civil society groups. And we decided to come together, to involve independent journalists in distributing these texts and collecting signatures and it was an immediate success. Because people wanted to see unity and coherence in position. And at that time it was Charter 97."
In 2010, Andrei Sannikov was the strongest opponent of Belarusian dictator Lukashenko in the presidential elections. He was born in 1954 in Minsk into a family closely connected with theatre - his father was a theatre critic, his grandmother an actress, his grandfather a director. After graduating from high school, he studied foreign languages and worked as an interpreter at Soviet construction sites in Pakistan and Egypt, as well as at the UN Secretariat in New York. During the perestroika era, he graduated from the MGIMO diplomatic school in Moscow and joined the Belarusian Foreign Ministry. After the collapse of the USSR, he led nuclear disarmament negotiations on behalf of the Belarusian side and rose to become Deputy Foreign Minister. In 1996 he abdicated his post in protest against growing concentration of power in the hands of President Lukashenko and joined the democratic opposition. He co-founded the Charter 97 organisation, co-organised the March for Freedom (2000) and the March for a Better Life (2003). In 2003 he was arrested for the first time and sentenced to 15 days’ imprisonment. He ran for president in 2010, raising high hopes, but according to official results he received just under three percent of the vote. He was beaten during protests against electoral manipulation, arrested together with his wife, journalist Irina Chalyp, and subsequently sentenced to five years for allegedly organising mass unrest. He spent more than a year and a half in prisons and penal colonies and was released in April 2012. After that, he was unable to find work and had to fear for his life. He decided to leave Belarus, fled to Lithuania and then moved to London to join his sister. Today, he lives in Poland, still tries to support the Belarusian democratic opposition and does not stop believing in the European future of his native country. He was in Prague in 2024 at the invitation of the Forum 2000 Foundation, which we thank for arranging this interview.
