Young Opposition Activist Zhaleznichenka Hospitalized after Three Days of Hunger Strike

Young opposition activist Dzmitry Zhaleznichenka, who went on a hunger strike on Friday, protesting his expulsion from Homyel State University and his drafting into the army, has been hospitalized.

An officer at the number 83469 Transport Troops unit in Zhlobin, where Mr. Zhaleznichenka was assigned, refused to tell BelaPAN about the reason for the hospitalization.

Dzmitry had not slept for several days and had a high blood pressure on Friday, the recruitment day, but he was still denied an additional medical examination, Ala Zhaleznichenka, his mother, told BelaPAN. “And afterwards he went on a hunger strike, which probably caused his illness and hospitalization,” she said.

Mr. Zhaleznichenka, a member of the Belarusian Popular Front, was expelled from the university on January 22, thus becoming eligible for active military service.

He told BelaPAN on Friday that he was set to refuse food until his recruitment order was revoked or until he was transferred to a military unit in which orders would be given in the Belarusian language.

As Mr. Zhaleznichenka said, he was called up for military service when he still was a student and he was shown the expulsion order by the university's representative only at the military recruitment office.

On Thursday, the young man was detained for three hours on suspicion that he had used fraud to obtain $100 in cash. Police brought a fraud charge against him.

The military recruitment office ignored Mr. Zhaleznichenka's suspect status. "It was clearly a provocation, but I don’t understand what was its purpose," Dzmitry commented.

On January 22, Mr. Zhaleznichenka was expelled from the university for the second time, again for alleged violations of the university’s internal rules.

A few days earlier, a district court in Homyel overturned the first expulsion order and ruled that Mr. Zhaleznichenka should be reinstated as third-year student at the university’s mathematics department, where he had studied before September 2007.

The rector signed the second order after the board of the students' union voted seven to five in favor of expulsion. At the meeting, Valery Nedastup, head of the university’s legal department, said that the first order had been overturned because of merely technical errors, and recalled that the youth had served a jail sentence on a charge of disorderly conduct following his first expulsion.