Free Ihar Bancer [Igor Bantser]

Accord­ing to the police, on Sep­tem­ber 5 at 3 AM, Ihar was in one of the enter­tain­ment dis­tricts of Hrod­na city. The musi­cian went out into the street, saw a police car there, approached it and alleged­ly began to dance in front of it naked.  Eye­wit­ness­es filmed this action and post­ed it on one of the Hrod­na Telegram chan­nels. Bancer’s friends say that in that video it is clear that Ihar did not take off his under­wear, which means that he can­not be naked. How­ev­er, a crim­i­nal case was sub­se­quent­ly opened against Ihar Bancer under Arti­cle 339 of the Crim­i­nal Code (Hooli­gan­ism), although Igor has stat­ed in court that his actions were mere­ly an expres­sion of dance. 

Andrzej Poc­zobut, a Hrod­na jour­nal­ist and mem­ber of the Union of Poles in Belarus believes that the author­i­ties are tak­ing revenge on Bancer for his per­for­mances, which have always been loud and res­onat­ed in soci­ety.

At dif­fer­ent peri­ods of his impris­on­ment, Ihar was placed in a pun­ish­ment cell, has not received care pack­ages, was deprived of meet­ings with his rel­a­tives and was tak­en to a com­pul­so­ry psy­chi­atric exam­i­na­tion. More­over, for some time, law enforce­ment agen­cies would not pro­vide any infor­ma­tion about Igor at all. Thus, the activist’s rel­a­tives were unaware of his loca­tion or con­di­tion dur­ing this time.

Ihar Bancer is the leader of the Hrod­na street punk band Mis­ter X cre­at­ed in 2003. Before that, he sang in the punk band «Tvar». Mis­ter X is a well-known group in the Pol­ish under­ground punk scene. There the group is often called the most famous Belaru­sian punk rock band and the flag­ship of Belaru­sian street punk. Since its incep­tion, the group has toured in Poland, Latvia, Lithua­nia, Ger­many. In Hrod­na, Ihar Bancer is engaged in cul­tur­al and social activ­i­ties. He is fond of mixed mar­tial arts, Thai box­ing. He is mar­ried with three chil­dren. Veg­e­tar­i­an, alco­hol-free, anti-fas­cist and anti-racist. Ihar is 41 years old as of 2021.

In sol­i­dar­i­ty with Banсer, fans of the foot­ball club «St. Pauli»  paint­ed graf­fi­ti in Ham­burg and hung a ban­ner in the sta­di­um dur­ing a foot­ball match. In Ger­many, Mis­ter X’s label has launched a #free­bancer cam­paign.  «Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al» has also report­ed about Ihar Bancer’s case.

Take an action: You could express sup­port for Ihar by send­ing him your words of encour­age­ment.

Address: prison №1, Kirov st. 1, 230023 Grod­no, Belarus 

to Bantser Igor Romanovich.

Feel free to use hash­tag #free­bancer for raise pub­lic aware­ness on Ihar case.