Defiant senior activist Bahinskaja says police sent her to psychiatric clinic a few times

November 3, BPN. Nina Bahinskaja, a prominent 75-year-old opposition activist, told BPN that police officers, who detained her during her famous walks with a white-red-white flag in Minsk, took her to a mental hospital for examination several times.

Most recently it happened on September 19, when Bahinskaja staged a one-woman picket to celebrate the 31st anniversary of the white-red-white flag becoming a state symbol (it lost that status after the 1995 referendum).

“They called an ambulance and took me to the chief doctor at Navinki [mental health facility in Minsk]. He tells me: ‘Nina, don’t walk around here [in the city]. I will be punished because my doctors do not want to declare you insane. Next time, take the flag and go out for a walk in the woods. Mrs. Bahinskaja, we’re already tired of having to refuse [the authorities],” she recalled.

Bahinskaja was free to go after that conversation.

In October 2020, Alaksandr Łukašenka told officials not to arrest Bahinskaja, saying that he considered her a person with beliefs: if she were “removed from the squares,” he said, “there would be no more opposition.”

Police usually detain Bahinskaja briefly. She has not been jailed in the last two years, although police raided her apartment in November 2020.

Bahinskaja has been active in the opposition movement since 1980s. The German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost described her as “the last Belarusian demonstrator.”