Belarus: Press under duress
By Maxim Ivashyn Posted Oct 1 2005
EPA PHOTO/Kontantin Zavrashin
Anti-fascist youth activists with 'Free Pavel Sheremet' posters protest the arrest of the Russian ORT bureau chief by Belarusian authorities in 1997. Journalists in Belarus, especially those representing the opposition and minority presses, have become targets in an ever-widening, government-supported campaign to silence their voices and cripple independent news operations.
The Republic of Belarus is, unfortunately, among the countries with the worst press freedom situations today. The regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, recently referred to by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as “truly still the last remaining true dictatorship in the heart of Europe,” is frequently compared to those in North Korea and Cuba.
Reporting the truth in Belarus is quite difficult. Journalists who write for the independent media exercise self-censorship to a large extent; they frequently must soften or otherwise rephrase certain passages in their stories, or else their work might be heavily edited or rejected altogether. This is especially true when covering governmental actions and Belarusian politics in general. To file a lawsuit against the media is easy; judges often take every opportunity to punish the independent press and they often interpret its publications as harmful to the state or libelous to the president.
About two years ago the Ministry of Information of the Republic of Belarus amended the national Press Law, in part to further protect the state from the truth journalists report. Today it is possible to lawfully close a certain media organization if it has received three warnings from the ministry in one year. A warning can be issued on such a minor matter as, for example, a failure to inform the ministry about changes in circulation or number of issues per week. This is exactly what happened to western Belarus-based independent Mestnaja Gazeta (Local Newspaper) in the spring of 2004. However, in another similar situation, when a state-supported newspaper of the same region, Nash Chas (Our Time), failed to report changes in its publishing schedule and left its datelines unaltered, the ministry refrained from issuing any warning and Nash Chas remained clear of any wrongdoing.
There have been, however, much more serious and frightening cases in the past few years that speak to the danger facing journalists in Belarus. One tragic story is that of Dmitri Zavadsky, cameraman of Russian ORT channel, who was kidnapped and very likely killed in 2001.
At the Zavadsky murder trial, Belarus officials pointed to a “Chechen trace” as the crime motive and identified five suspects. It was stated in court that Zavadsky, while filming a documentary in Chechnya, came face-to-face with certain mercenaries of Belarusian origin and training. Reluctant to be exposed as supporters of Chechen rebels, these soldiers of fortune kidnapped Zavadsky on the road to the capital's airport. Two former members of a special police force unit were later found guilty of abducting Zavadsky and sentenced to life in prison. However, Zavadsky's family and legal team maintain that Belarusian government authorities had a hand in the kidnapping. The case was reopened by prosecutors in December 2003 to investigate this allegation but was abruptly suspended four months later without a specific explanation. Zavadsky was declared officially dead in November 2003, though his body still has not been found.
Likewise, the “Iraqi trace” emerged later in the case of Veronika Cherkasova. On October 20, 2004, Cherkasova, an accomplished and experienced journalist, was brutally murdered in her apartment in Minsk. Although she had been cooperating with both the Russian-based Solidarnost independent newspaper as well as Novoe Vremja (New Time) magazine, her coverage focused on social issues, not politics.
From the beginning, the Cherkasova investigation team (the same group who investigated the Zavadsky case) was following a domestic violence lead. As a result, investigators deemed Cherkasova's fifteen-year-old son, Anton Filimonov, the main suspect. They heavily interrogated the boy and reportedly beat him. In the end, Anton suffered an emotional breakdown.
It turned out that Cherkasova was closely following and occasionally covering Belarusian-Iraqi relations with a special emphasis on bank transactions and, possibly, the arms trade. Currently, the investigation has not gone any further, and the case remains open. Anton fled Belarus in early February to live with his father in Russia shortly after investigators tried to force him into a psychiatric facility. However, in mid-April of this year, investigators officially cleared Cherkasova's son and stepfather as suspects in her murder.
Multiple and, alas, hard to prove rumors surround the cases of Zavadsky and Cherkasova. For example, when prominent opposition political figures, such as former Minister of Interior Yuri Zakharenko or businessman-politician Viktor Gonchar went missing, reports of so-called Belarusian death squads started to circulate. These squads are elite police forces reportedly involved in a variety of activities from suppression of public disobedience to death-penalty executions. Chief police-force officers report directly to Viktor Sheyman, head of the Presidential Administration and former national security chief, who is known to act as Lukashenko's right hand. Naturally, any possible connections between these forces and the two journalists' deaths are kept strictly secret.
An independent military-related investigation conducted at the end of 2003 became another frightening example of the underground campaign to suppress free speech in Belarus. Retired KGB officer Pavel Shegunov decided to test the speculation that Iraqi chemical weapons allegedly were transported to and stored at the military facility in the small town of Starye Dorogi, some 100 miles south of Minsk.
At the time, there were definite signs of increasing activity at the facility. Originally designed as an anti-radiation chemical storage facility, the unit suddenly became heavily patrolled as new watchtowers were erected and barbed wires stretched. Army personnel were partially substituted by military police officers. Heavy truck convoys frequently were spotted entering and leaving the base with bulletproofed vehicles. Chemical residues found on gas masks abandoned outside the facility's wired perimeter were of an unusual color and unknown substance.
Yet by November 2003, all of the findings from this private investigation were inconclusive. Chemical analysis of the found residues had not been conducted and Shegunov and his freelance photographer considered the issue unresolved. By that time, Shegunov had his passport in hand as he planned to move to Norway after closing the case. He had also briefed a Belarusian writer for the Russian Novaya Gazeta on his findings.
Unfortunately, Shegunov never saw his investigation through to its conclusion. Early in the morning on December 1, 2003, Shegunov was found dead in the kitchen of his own home. His wife found him hanged on the stove hatch in a kneeling position, his forehead bearing a huge bruise. She was unable to cut the rope around his neck — strangely, all the knives had been taken from the house.
Officially, authorities classified Shegunov's death as a suicide. The photographer with whom he worked worried about his own safety and left Belarus just days after Shegunov's funeral. He now lives in Germany and is awaiting a grant of political asylum. It's no surprise that the covert activities of the military unit at Starye Dorogi remain unexposed.
Finally, in late April of this year, another cautionary tale: two Russian reporters were taken into custody after Chernobylsky Shlyakh, the annual protest in Minsk that commemorates the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Authorities later found Alexei Ametov of Russian Newsweek and Mikhail Romanov of the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets guilty of taking part in an unauthorized rally and sentenced them to 10 and eight days, respectively, in a detention center.
The International Press Institute reacted quickly by sending President Lukashenko a written condemnation of the prison sentences. “Limiting press freedom and other basic human rights will only prevent your government's ability to ensure security and stability in Belarus,” IPI Director Johann P. Fritz wrote. Russian diplomats in Belarus reacted less quickly. The consulate representative visited detained journalists a full two days after the sentencing. A day later, Ametov and Romanov were released from the detention center, though no details on their sentence withdrawal or suspension are available at this time.
The case of Ametov and Romanov is new and disturbing. Russian journalists, who have significant presence in the Belarusian media market, rarely have been intimidated or provoked while covering the opposition movement in Belarus. When they have been targeted, it's been for more serious matters. For instance, NTV's Russian-born bureau chief in Minsk, Alexander Stupnikov, was deported at President Lukashenko's request in 1997 and forced to leave Belarus within 24 hours after broadcasting a series of reports that were sharply critical of Belarusian politics. In 1999, ORT Russian television bureau chief Pavel Sheremet and the late Dmitri Zavadsky were tried and found guilty of illegal Belarusian-Lithuanian border crossing while working on a story about grey import from the EU to Russia. Both men received suspended prison sentences.
But as alarming as these events may be, the detainment, trial and sentencing of Ametov and Romanov for covering a routine, public street rally signals a new era in the Belarus government's desire to crackdown on press freedom and silence the voices of dissent.
Fear, foreign aid and financing a freer press
THE LARGEST NEWSPAPERS and TV stations in Belarus are still financed from the national budget. Independent newspapers are the definite minority in Belarus mostly due to economic reasons; it’s hard to survive when your advertising revenue depends on the brave few who place ads in the opposition press.
The leading industries in Belarus, which generate the most production revenue for the country, have been converted to state-controlled, joint-stock companies and are barred from advertising in the independent media through a silent, unwritten agreement. The use of unwritten, Soviet-style “telephone laws” is widespread among Belarusian bureaucrats. In theory, everyone is equal in the market. But in reality, phone calls from high places can dramatically change the activities of certain news organizations.
So, with this advertising ban in effect, the potential ad income to fuel a free press is small and unsteady; sometimes it is only a few hundred U.S. dollars per month for a newspaper with a national circulation. State officials scrutinize other sources, such as foreign grants, so strictly that it is virtually impossible for independent media to exist on foreign help alone. As for broadcasting media in Belarus who might not comply with government views, the answer is simple: there are none. Some broadcasting outlets in neighboring countries are just now starting their operations with financial help from the United States and the European Union.
About a dozen Belarusian independent news outlets are available on the Internet. Some of them are significantly biased toward the views of certain political groups and news producers. Those media outlets serving the aims of political parties are usually funded by party budgets. Internet news media that claim to be independent are usually supported by foreign aid and private financial initiatives.
Lukashenko's firm grip on media mouthpieces
IN BELARUS, it isn’t what you can say, but saying anything at all. The republic is plagued by a government-supported movement to suppress speech and cripple the independent press that first took hold in 18th century czarist Russia. The Bolshevik and Soviet regimes continued the tradition for virtually the entire 20th century, followed by current President Lukashenko who took power in 1994. The only free-press period spanned from 1991, upon the proclamation of Belarusian independence from the Soviet Union, to 1995 — less than one year after Lukashenko won the first presidential election in Belarus.
Subsequently, the Belarus government has reorganized the state-owned, Soviet-era media, which are still prevalent, to support its own views and political goals. Starting in 1995, the government replaced most of the freethinking chief editors and board members. One way or another, by the end of the 20th century, all state-owned media had been purged of anyone who the government suspected of being disloyal.