Cichanoŭskaja commemorates opposition politicians missing since 1999

September 16, Pozirk. Belarusian opposition leader Śviatłana Cichanoŭskaja has commemorated Viktar Hančar and Anatol Krasoŭski, political opponents of Alaksandar Łukašenka, who went missing in 1999.

“On this day in 1999, Viktar Hančar and Anatol Krasoŭski were abducted and murdered by the Belarus regime’s death squads,” she said on X. “Their families still have no graves to visit. For 27 years, the regime has denied their families truth and justice. Those responsible will answer.”

Other missing persons include former Interior Minister Juryj Zacharanka and cameraman Dźmitryj Zavadski. Their families made numerous attempts to find out their whereabouts, but investigations conducted by authorities have not answered the key question: what happened to the victims of abductions.

Authorities swept the issue under the carpet during the subsequent presidential election, in which Łukašenka was declared the winner.

In 2001, Christos Pourgourides, rapporteur of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, concluded after visiting Belarus that “steps were taken at the highest level of the state to actively cover up the true background of the disappearances.” Evidence suggested that “senior officials of the state may themselves be involved in these disappearances,” it said.

In 2019, media reported that exiled former elite police unit Juryj Haraŭski admitted to being a member of a government-run death squad that allegedly abducted and killed Krasoŭski and Hančar in 1999.

Although he was acquitted at a trial in Switzerland in 2023, the hearing was important in itself because Belarusian investigators have never established the fact of the murder. Belarusian investigators admitted that the opposition figures had vanished, but said they did not know what had happened to them.

In the Haraŭski trial, the Swiss judge concluded that the ex-SOBR member might have been involved in crimes, but his role remained unidentified.