On Sunday, Zhanna Charniauskaya, a Belarusian living in exile outside of Chicago, plans to march along Michigan Avenue for all those back home who cannot.
Charniauskaya, 55, will march for her old neighbors in Minsk, the capital of the country, who were imprisoned: Ales Bialiatski, a Nobel Peace Prize winner she met in Chicago, who has been imprisoned since 2021, and the thousands of others who are being held in penal colonies on political charges, according to human rights watch groups.
“In the diaspora, we become the voices of those political prisoners,” she said. “We have to speak their pain and let the world know.”
Charniauskaya left the small Eastern European country in the mid-1990s for work and now, by day, she’s a science teacher at a high school in Aurora.
But after dismissal, she’s a principal organizer of the local Belarusian community as they work to draw attention to what’s going on abroad and provide support for those still there.
Charniauskaya left the country not long after President Alexander Lukashenko came to power in 1994 and in the decades since she’s seen how political repression in the country has grown, especially in the wake of the country’s 2020 election, which Lukashenko claimed to have won despite the results being marred by fraud.
“Some get out of prison, but he puts more in every day,” she said. “It’s like a conveyor belt. It doesn’t’ stop, the machine of repression is working relentlessly.”
The march will begin Sunday near Washington Street and Michigan Avenue on the Millennium Park side at 1 p.m. The group plans to march north to Tribune Tower carrying posters with the names of political prisoners and distributing fliers with information on how to donate to the families of prisoners.
The date was chosen in honor of Vitold Ashurak, a political prisoner who died under unclear and suspicious circumstances in the country on May 21, 2021; the downtown march is one of many planned around the country and in Europe.
Charniauskaya, who has helped lead the group Belarusians in Chicago since 2010 and was elected in April as president of the Association of Belarusians in America, said the actions are risky - because “Belarusian KGB is following every political activist here” - but necessary.
“The story of the Belarusian people should not be hidden from the world,” she said. “We can eventually build a free Belarus.”
The Belarusian community in Chicago is small, but among those going is Vladzimir Kubyshkin of Bolingbrook.
Kubyshkin, 54, immigrated with his wife in 2015 for political reasons, and he’s become active in organizing the Belarusian community since Lukashenko’s crackdown.
“Terrible things are happening in the our country now,” he said. “It is also a very dangerous country for those who give their own personal opinion, and it doesn’t matter who you are - a musician, doctor or a factory worker.”
Like Charniauskaya, he hopes their efforts will draw attention the political repression in the country.
“Any changes are possible only with strong pressure from the world community,” he said. “We need to draw attention to our problems.”
Michael Loria is a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.
