The police in Belarus Thursday turned the heat on journalists trying to cover an attack by plainclothes policemen on an opposition candidate in the ensuing presidential polls.
Aleksandr Kozulin, one of three candidates challenging President Aleksandr Lukashenko, was assaulted and detained by the police in capital Minsk when he tried to enter a meeting to hear Lukashenko speak, local and international news organisations reported. Kozulin was released after almost eight hours in custody. Kozulin, whose Social Democratic Party had nominated him as a delegate to the conference, will be charged with hooliganism, prosecutors told the Moscow Times.
Reporters were detained inside the meeting hall to prevent them from recording the arrest of Kozulin who was driven away to the Oktryabrsk police station. Some were also beated up. Plainclothes security officers, armed with pistols, also shot the tire of a car in which a television cameraman was reportedly trying to escape, to force it to stop.
Siarhei Pulsha, correspondent with BelaPAN News Agency and Dmitry Madorsky, a correspondent for Reuters were both taken to hospital after suffering severe head injuries, the Internaitonal Federation of Journalists (IFJ) reported. Aleh Ulevich, correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Belarus was also severely beaten. Journalists Siarhei Hryts, Vasil Fiedasienka, Yulia Darashkevich and Dzmitry Brushko were also detained at the Kastrychnitski City District Department of Minsk.
"This is a shocking violation of democratic rights", said IFJ General Secretary Aidan White. "It is a grotesque assault on political rights made worse by the intimidation and violence used against journalists trying to do their job". IFJ said that the incident exposed how President Lukashenko tries to stifle opposition voices and manipulate the election in his own favour. "This incident needs to be fully investigated and those responsible for the violence must be dealt with," said White.
"This is nothing but state thuggery," said Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Executive Director Ann Cooper. "We condemn in the strongest terms these flagrant attempts to stifle media coverage of opposition candidates during the presidential campaign."
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which has sent observers to monitor the election campaign, said in a statement that the arrest followed a pattern of government pressure that reflected "a serious deterioration in the campaign atmosphere."
President Lukashenko retaliated later, asking Western critics to stay out of Belarus's affairs. Lukashenko, who faces tougher Western sanctions if a March 19 election which he is heavily favoured to win is denounced as unfair, vowed to take whatever steps were necessary to prevent Western-inspired subversion of his administration. In his speech, Lukashenko said his stewardship had boosted living standards. Western countries, he said, had no right to give lessons to his former Soviet state. "It is not for (the West) to teach us about human rights. Let them deal with their own affairs. They have plunged the entire Middle East into blood. We see your democracy soaked in blood," he said.
Kozulin, 50, a former education minister and rector at the Belarus State University, is less well known than Aleksandr Milinkevich, elected as a unified democratic opposition candidate by a disparate array of parties and organisations. Kozulin, however, has emerged as fiercer and more confrontational than Milinkevish during the campaign.
Aligned more with Russia, which has tacitly supported Lukashenko, Kozulin has harshly denounced the government's actions and provoked confrontations during official events, like a ceremony last month to register candidates. During his detention Thursday he smashed a framed portrait of Lukashenko at the police station.
The head of the Belarus State Security Service, the KGB, said on Wednesday that his agency had prevented a planned coup attempt by pro-western opposition that included riots in the capital and terrorist attacks aimed to provoke mass uprising.
KGB chairman Stepan Sukhorenko said that the opposition intended to accuse the authorities of falsifying the results of the upcoming presidential elections in the country, according to Interfax. They planned to execute the plan after the official announcement of the poll results on March 19.
CPJ, two weeks back, had said the Belarusian government's persecution of the country's few independent newspapers was undermining the integrity of the March 19 presidential election in which Aleksandr Lukashenko seeks a third term.
"No election can be valid when voters are deprived of independent news about the candidates and their positions," Alex Lupis, CPJ senior programme coordinator, told a press conference at the Independent Press Center in Moscow. "We're calling on the international community to condemn these abuses against the media and to repudiate the March 19 election unless independent journalists can work freely and inform Belarusian voters about the campaign."
Lupis traveled to Moscow after spending four days in Belarus meeting independent journalists. The press conference was held in Moscow because restrictions on the Belarusian press would limit coverage. Lupis was joined by Svetlana Kalinkina, managing editor of Belarus' largest opposition paper, Narodnaya Volya; Andrei Bastunets, deputy chairman of the Belarusian Association of Journalists; and Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations.
Lukashenko's administration has moved aggressively to limit coverage in the run-up to the vote, CPJ research shows. In December, Lukashenko signed into law amendments to the penal code that criminalise criticism of the president and his government. The law provides up to five years in jail for those who disseminate through the media "appeals" to international organisations or foreign governments that are deemed harmful to national security interests. The legislation does not explain what is meant by appeals, nor does it define what is harmful to security interests.
In recent months, police have seized entire print runs of opposition newspapers without explanation and prevented international journalists from reporting in Belarus. The national postal carrier Belpochta has refused to distribute more than a dozen opposition and independent titles, while banks have frozen the accounts of several opposition newspapers. Narodnaya Volya has been forced to print its editions in the Russian city of Smolensk since October 2005, after local printing companies dropped the contract under pressure from the Information Ministry.
"The state's main tool against the independent newspapers is to increase our financial expenses while imposing a total ban on distribution," said Kalinkina, a 2004 recipient of CPJ's International Press Freedom Award. "The Belarusian authorities are using these tactics because they want to be able to say they didn't close the newspapers and that journalists decided to stop working on their own."
A steady flow of new regulations and rulings over the past year illustrates those tactics. Lukashenko signed a presidential decree in May 2005 that banned independent media from using the words "Belarus" or "national" in their titles and required them to reregister with new names. The next month, the president signed a law increasing taxes on newspaper distributors. Politicised libel convictions nearly bankrupted Narodnaya Volya and the business daily Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta.
"Newspapers are forced to set up their own informal distribution systems because publishers, state newspaper distributors, and the post office refuse to do business with them," Bastunets said. In late 2005, Soyuzpechat, the state-owned distribution agency, refused to sell 19 opposition and independent newspapers at street kiosks, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists.
"President Lukashenko, his government, and the parliament have created a situation where campaign coverage in the Belarusian mass media benefits only the incumbent," said Oleg Panfilov, head of the Moscow-based Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations. "Such an atmosphere has been systematically built during Lukashenko's rule, with radio stations, newspapers, and Internet sites gradually being destroyed."
A constitutional amendment enabling Lukashenko to seek a third term was passed in October 2004 in a vote that OSCE said "fell significantly short" of democratic standards. Lukashenko and senior administration officials received more than 90 percent of the pre-election television coverage, according to OSCE. The government suspended the operations of at least a dozen newspapers before the vote.
Self-censorship is widespread as well, a product in part of the government's failure to properly investigate murders of three journalists: ORT cameraman Dmitry Zavadsky, who disappeared in July 2000; Veronika Cherkasova, a reporter for the opposition weekly Solidarnost, who was stabbed to death in October 2004; and Vasily Grodnikov, a freelance journalist for Narodnaya Volya, who died from a head wound in October 2005.
In the Cherkasova case, authorities focused on the victim's teenage son as a suspect but have not investigated work-related motives. The son, 16-year-old Anton Filimonov, was arrested on December 28, 2005 on unrelated counterfeiting charges and has been in detention since. His grandparents and local human rights organisations expressed deep concern about Filimonov's safety and say that investigators have been pressuring the teenager to "confess" to murdering his mother.
Zavadsky, a Belarusian cameraman for the Russian public television station ORT, was reported missing after he failed to keep an appointment with colleague Pavel Sheremet. Sheremet and Zavadsky had recently traveled to Chechnya to shoot "The Chechen Diary," a documentary about the war. CPJ sources in Belarus suspect that Zavadsky was abducted because he had footage that showed Belarusian security agents fighting alongside Chechen rebel forces. A 2003 report by the Council of Europe alleged that high-level government officials were involved in the journalist's disappearance, but the public prosecutor's office has closed its investigation without arrests.
Grodnikov, a freelancer for Narodnaya Volya, was found dead in his apartment with a head wound. His apartment was ransacked, but his niece said that there was no sign of robbery or forced entry. He covered social issues for the newspaper.
