Reports of dissenters working for £4 a day on onion plantation owned by Saxony state parliament AfD member Jörg Dornau
Midway through Nikolai’s shift sorting onions alongside other political prisoners in a warehouse in western Belarus, a tall and bald foreigner entered the building. “He arrived in a car with German license plates. Then he came over and greeted us warmly,” Nikolai*, recalled in an interview with the Observer. The onion plantation, where Nikolai and dozens of other political detainees were working in February 2024, was owned by Jörg Dornau, a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Saxony’s state parliament. Nikolai claims that the man he saw that day, touring the farm and speaking to workers, was Dornau himself. Dornau, 54, a heavily built farmer with a bald pate, was revealed to be the owner of the onion farm located on Belarussian soil earlier this year when he was fined €20,862 for failing to declare his extra, non-parliamentary income with the Saxony parliament in which he has sat as an MP since 2019. Despite the obvious moral questions around collaborating with a dictatorship, the matter might have moved little beyond the issue of the fine, except for the new allegations that have emerged claiming that he knowingly employed political prisoners there. Reports that Dornau had struck a deal with a prison in Lida, a city in western Belarus, to employ prisoners jailed for political dissent were first reported last week by the independent Belarusian outlet Reform.news. Dornau was approached by the Observer and asked for comment about the legal and ethical concerns surrounding the allegations, but did not respond. Nikolai said there were around 30 prisoners working on the farm during his time there in February, many of whom, like him, had been jailed on political grounds. They sorted onions for roughly £4 a day on what he described as a strictly voluntary basis. A few weeks earlier, Nikolai had been detained by the Belarusian security services for “liking” an old social media post from 2021 and was sentenced to 15 days in jail as part of the regime’s brutal crackdown on all forms of dissent.
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