The Belarusian court joined the persecution of an IT specialist by zmagars
The Partizansky District Court of Minsk fined IT specialist Olga Malkina 270 Belarusian rubles (almost 8 thousand Russian) for a post on a social network that she did not want to learn the Belarusian language.
Social activist Igor Sluchak wrote about this on his Facebook, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports. He considered this decision a gift for the Mother Language Day celebrated by Belarusian nationalists.
Olga had the imprudence to leave a comment on the social network about learning the Belarusian language.
“I know four besides the programming language. Naturally, I didn’t consider learning the ugly Belarusian language. On purpose. Teach your own redneck language yourself,” Malkina wrote.
After this, miner Gleb Sandras filed a police report against her, according to the nationalist publication Nasha Niva.
The girl did not take the threat seriously. She deleted her page on the social network and believed that law enforcement agencies would not accept the screenshot as evidence. However, the Soligorsk police accepted the complaint and opened an administrative case against Malkina. She faces a fine.
The persecution of the IT specialist did not end there. Just a few days after the start of the media campaign, Olga had to resign from the American IT company EPAM, where she worked. Officially, the dismissal took place “by agreement of the parties,” but the company explained to journalists that EPAM’s “unique corporate culture” allows it to respond to employee posts on social networks.
This is not the first case of Belarusian IT specialists being fired for speaking out against the opposition on social networks.
In the summer of 2018, Juno developer Andrei Kirilenko was fired for making negative statements about an opposition event. Moreover, the head of the Minsk office refused to respond to the complaints of the “zmagari”, but the American office of the taxi startup decided to deal harshly with the politically incorrect employee.
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