Olga Karach in issue No. 6 of the Swedish activists’ magazine Ställ om! (November 2025)
A Swedish activist-run magazine, distributed among religious communities, ecological movements, peace advocates, and human rights defenders, has published a substantial interview with Belarusian human rights defender Olga Karach, director of the Belarusian human rights organization Our House, operating in exile.
The interview opens with the well-known words of German pastor and anti-fascist Martin Niemöller (1946):
First they came for the communists –
I did not speak out, because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the social democrats –
I did not speak out, because I was not a social democrat.
Then they came for the trade unionists –
I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews –
I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me –
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
The interview focuses on the emergence of “necropolitical spaces” – zones of exception in which the rule of law no longer applies and decisions over people’s lives, freedom, or even death are taken arbitrarily by state institutions, outside any legal framework.
Olga Karach describes her own personal experience, showing how such necropolitical practices spread like a malignant tumor when they are not halted in time, and analyzes the mechanisms through which the Belarusian dictatorship has been built.
Human rights are never violated only for one group while remaining intact for all others. Once this process begins, the erosion of democratic institutions becomes inevitable.
The full interview in Swedish can be read here:
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