U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
For Immediate Release
July 18, 2001

STATEMENT BY PHILIP T. REEKER, DEPUTY SPOKESMAN

Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Lorne Craner met on July 17 with Lyudmila Karpenko, Irina Krasovskaya, Svetlana Zavadskaya, and Tatiana Klimova. The group also met with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Steven Pifer and officials at the National Security Council.

These women came to Washington to condemn the lack of human rights in Belarus and to press for an independent investigation of their husbands' disappearances. Mrs. Karpenko has established the Karpenko Foundation to focus on the plight of the disappeared and other victims of political repression in Belarus.

The United States remains greatly concerned by a series of politically-motivated disappearances in Belarus and the climate of political repression imposed by the Lukashenko regime. Four prominent individuals, all opposed to the Lukashenko regime have disappeared since 1999. To date, Belarusian authorities have not provided any accounting of the whereabouts of these individuals.

Credible reports and the publication of documents July 17 in Minsk implicate senior Lukashenko regime officials in these disappearances. Two prosecutor's office investigators from Belarus claim that a death squad created by the Lukashenko regime was responsible for all four of the disappearances of the opposition figures.

The United States takes these allegations very seriously and calls on the Belarusian authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the disappearances of Mr. Zakharenko, Mr. Gonchar, Mr. Krasovsky and Mr. Zavadsky, and account for their whereabouts.