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.
Belarus was first rocked by mass pro-democracy protests during Aleksandr Lukashenko’s controversial re-election as president in August 2020 for a sixth term, which the opposition and the west condemned as fraudulent.
At that time, Belarusian authorities detained more than 35,000 people, many of whom were tortured in custody or left the country. Dornau is reported to have established Zybulka-Bel Ltd, the company that runs the farm, in October 2020 when nationwide pro-democracy protests were still sweeping the country.
Since then, the Lukashenko regime, backed by Vladimir Putin – whom Minsk in turn supports in the war in Ukraine – has intensified its repression of even the smallest acts of dissent, charging critics with “extremism” and “terrorism” for actions as minor as leaving critical comments on social media or following so-called “extremist” Telegram channels.
Human rights groups estimate that there are currently more than 1,400 political prisoners in Belarus, including Viasna’s founder, Nobel peace prize laureate Ales Bialiatski.
On the farm, Nikolai described the work as difficult, with long days and the harsh February cold.
“We had breakfast at 7am and worked until evening, with few breaks,” he recalled. However, he stressed that he had no complaints about the labour, saying he preferred it to being in jail.
“I went to work with a smile. It felt like complete freedom compared to being locked up.”
“And the onions tasted good,” he added.
The Observer could not independently verify Nikolai’s account, but an independent prison watchdog group reported receiving accounts from prisoners working at Dornau’s onion farm starting from early 2024.
“Around 30 people were brought in at once to work – from both the detention centre and the pre-trial detention facility. About 20 hired workers were also working for wages,” the watchdog told the Observer.
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After his release from jail in Belarus, Nikolai, who had already been detained twice on political grounds and now faced the threat of a longer sentence, decided to flee the country.
AfD politicians have often been accused of acting as mouth pieces for the Kremlin, earning the party the lingering moniker “Putin-friendly”. Allegations have swirled for years that they have also benefited financially from their connections with Moscow.
Reports that an MP from the AfD may have financially benefited from employing political prisoners jailed for opposing Lukashenko will likely bring new scrutiny to the party’s ties with authoritarian regimes.
Other AfD politicians, including those in the Saxony parliament, which sits in the eastern city of Dresden and where he is a member, were also asked for a response but none of them replied.
A spokesperson for the Saxony AfD parliamentary group in Dresden said: “As a matter of principle, our group does not comment on anonymous allegations”.
The only response from the party so far has been from a member of the “wing” – the most radical element of the AfD to which Dornau also belongs. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider called for people to “show solidarity” towards Dornau.
Tillschneider, known as a Putin ally who has defended Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said of the allegations: “If the Belarussian penal system allows for the possibility that prisoners are put to work, like they are in Germany, and such undertakings take place in the fields belonging to my colleague Dornau, then there is nothing wrong with that. Yuck, what a smear campaign!” he wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Dornau has continued to operate his company in Belarus. In addition to onions and other vegetables, the farm is reported to mainly produce melons, root plants, and tubers.
But the revelations may yet have legal repercussions for Dornau.
A lawyer linked to the Greens took to X to say that he had filed a criminal complaint against Dornau. “If the evidence from the Belarussian newspaper is confirmed, this is clearly a case of exploitation of people in difficult circumstances,” he wrote.
*Some names have been changed