More than once we have encountered a situation where our activists have found themselves under the scrutiny of punitive authorities. Although no KPD participant has ever been detained directly because of participation in the KPD, sometimes activists are arrested for participation in rallies and other activities in the past. When there is a threat of arrest, it is very important to act quickly and have a financial reserve to maintain freedom. Most often, punishers look at residence addresses and relatives, track phone numbers and card payments. Changing your phone, SIM card, and place of residence greatly reduces the likelihood of arrest. The levy will not be used to relocate activists outside of Belarus.
Depending on the amount of the collection, we implement several stages of the project:
- Up to 400 euros — paying for the Magistral servers for secure communication with activists.
- Up to 5950 Euros — we additionally purchase anonymous phones and SIM cards, create a reserve fund for transportation, food and medicines; organize shelters for activists. We disseminate information about the shelters along the Motorway, i.e. we increase the number of activists in Belarus who will be aware of the possibility of a quick “disappearance” in Belarus.
Up to 9550 euros extra, we:
- Conduct a series of online meetings with new soupolks and individual activists (about 200 people in total), where we segment soupolks by type of activism (direct action on the ground, online actions, work on the development of KPD or their soupolks, etc.);
- Individually advise activists on safety issues based on their type of activism;
- A lot of people are not just unaware of what baisol is doing, but we will offer activists to participate in new projects with safety measures in mind, create a base of “working hands”;
- We will develop a new KPD project and start working on it together with partners. Theme: “Investigation of the Lukashenko regime's accomplices”.
After implementation of the 3rd stage of the project and publication of its results the KPD plans to continue the topic of investigation of the regime crimes and will continue to publish the personal data of punishers and other state criminals.
The KPD has been non-public until recently, you can read a brief summary of our work below:
“The Coalition of Protest Yards (CPD) was created by local communities in 2021 on the wave of self-organization of civic activists during the 2020-21 protests in Belarus to unite efforts to defend sovereignty, democratize and normalize social and political life in Belarus.
Civic activists' activities are aimed at communities (supporters) and individual activists to enable them to self-organize safely and effectively; to set goals together and achieve them; and to develop their potential and horizontal connections. This uses the people, knowledge, and resources of both KPD participants and partners (Magistral, BySOL, Supratsiou, Cyberpartisans, and a number of other non-public partners). One of the goals of the KPD is to participate in the formation of the transitional government and the development of local self-government in New Belarus.
The main completed KPD projects are „20 days” and „102”, joint investigations with Cyberpartisans of Lukashenko's regime accomplices, conducted in a secure online environment by KPD participants from Belarus and published on blackmap.org.
Our main projects for coordinating activists inside Belarus are “Magistral” and “Swarm”. “Magistral” is a communication system between closed chats, built on top of the Telegram messenger. It allows groups of activists in Belarus to securely exchange messages with each other and share information relevant to the protest. “Swarm” is about building and developing a network of autonomous protest cells on the ground. Both projects promote the KPD information agenda, attract new participants and collect feedback from activists on KPD activities and the situation “on the ground.”
How much money is needed?
9950 € — servers for the “Magistralia”; anonymous SIM cards; “clean” smartphones; transport across the RB to the shelter; food, medicines; expenses for organizing logistics; payment for the project works.