   
|
|
BELARUS
The Constitution provides for freedom of speech, as well
as the freedom to receive, retain, and disseminate
information, but the Government restricts these rights in
practice. The executive branch continued its
suppression of freedom of speech through a decree
limiting citizens’ rights to express their
opinions. The Government also continued its
campaign against the independent media by adopting new
restrictive amendments to the law on press and other mass
media, and by placing a ban on the dissemination of
official information to the independent media.
Although the Constitution prohibits a monopoly of mass
media, the Government also continued to restrict severely
the right to a free press through near-monopolies on the
means of production and on national level broadcast
media, and by denying accreditation to journalists
critical of the regime. The Government also kept up
economic pressure on the independent media by pressuring
advertisers to withdraw advertisements and by evicting
newspapers from their offices. Employees at
state-run enterprises are discouraged from subscribing to
independent newspapers and journals.
In 1996,
President Lukashenko signed a decree ordering that all
editors in chief of state-supported newspapers would
henceforth be official state employees and would become
members of the appropriate level government
council. Another decree granted the Ministry of
Press authority to assign graduates of state-supported
journalism schools to work in state-owned media
organizations as a means of payment for their
schooling. These decrees remain in effect.
Presidential
decree number five, issued in March 1997, prohibits a
range of broadly defined activities and limits freedom of
expression. For example, the decree prohibits
individuals from carrying placards or flags bearing
emblems that are not officially registered with the
State, as well as “emblems, symbols, and posters
whose content is intended to harm the State and public
order, rights, and legal interests of the
citizens.” The decree also bans activities
that are “humiliating to the dignity and honor of
the executive persons of state bodies.”
The Defamation
Law makes no distinction between private and public
persons for the purposes of lawsuits for defamation of
character. A public figure who has been criticized
for poor performance in office may ask the public
prosecutor to sue the newspaper that printed the
criticism. On June 4, the lower house of the
National Assembly approved a bill that stipulated that
public insults or libel against the President could be
punished by up to 4 years in prison, 2 years in a labor
camp, or a large fine. However, no one was arrested
or charged during the year under the new law.
In 1997 the
Council of Ministers issued a decree that prohibited and
restricted the movement of goods across customs
borders. The decree specifically prohibited the
import and export of printed, audio, and video materials,
or other news media containing information that could
damage the economic and political interests of the
country. The decree targets, among others, some
opposition-affiliated bulletins published outside of the
country. On May 2, customs officials confiscated at
the Belarus-Ukraine border 900 copies of Belarusian News
from leaders of the opposition Belarusian Popular
Front. On August 10, authorities on the
Belarus-Ukraine border detained for 8 hours two Czech
nationals and confiscated film and written materials that
they believed were intended to “discredit the public
and political system in Belarus.” On October
19, customs officials confiscated approximately 1,800
copies of Belarusian News from antigovernment activists
at the Belarus-Ukraine border.
The Belarusian
Patriotic Union of Youth, a government-subsidized
presidential youth organization, was permitted to take
control of Radio 101.2. Radio 101.2 had been the
sole Belarusian language independent station in the
country until government authorities shut it down during
1996.
Independent
newspapers are widely available in Minsk, but outside of
the capital most towns carry only local newspapers, only
some of which are independent. In November 1997,
the State Committee on the Press issued two warnings to
the largest independent newspaper, Svaboda, alleging that
two of its recent articles violated the Law on the Press
by trying to incite social unrest. Svaboda
subsequently was closed following a ruling by the Supreme
Economic Court. On January 23, government
authorities issued a warning to Naviny, a new newspaper
founded by former Svaboda staffers, for reprinting the
Svaboda logo on its front page.
On May 29, the
State Committee on the Press officially warned Nasha
Niva, an independent newspaper published in Belarusian,
to stop using traditional Belarusian orthography in favor
of spelling reforms first introduced under Joseph Stalin
in 1933. In an attempt to forestall what appeared
to be the beginning of a government campaign to shut down
the newspaper, Nasha Niva filed a lawsuit against the
State Committee on the Press. Under the amendments
to the Law on Press and Other Media of December 1997,
Nasha Niva could be banned if two more warnings are
issued. On August 14, the Supreme Economic Court
called for the creation of a special philological
commission to examine the issue further. In
December after the philological commission completed its
investigation, the Supreme Economic Court annulled the
warning given to Nasha Niva.
On June 1, the
State Committee on the Press issued an official warning
to the Minsk-based independent newspaper Zdravy Smysl for
providing “distorted information.” The
warning followed an article in Zdravy Smysl that reported
that the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists
had included President Lukashenko on their list of the
world’s ten worst “enemies of the
press.” In July local authorities in the town
of Dyatlovo attempted to pressure the editors of the
opposition-affiliated Nasha Prawda to close down
following the newspaper’s publication of an article
by Zyanon Paznyak, the exiled leader of the Belarusian
Popular Front. In August, two editors of Nasha
Prawda were questioned by the local police and fined.
On December 2,
new regulations went into effect that restrict the
distribution of legal information to specially licensed
media. The regulations required the independent
media that publish legal acts to apply for licenses from
a commission under the Ministry of Justice. Several
independent informational bulletins, including Femida and
Beloruski Rynok, were denied licenses.
State-controlled Belarusian television and radio (B-TR)
maintains its monopoly as the only nationwide television
station. Its news programs regularly featured
reporting biased in favor of the Government and refused
to provide an outlet for opposing viewpoints.
Local, independent television stations operated in some
areas, and were relatively unimpeded in reporting on
local news. However, some of these stations
reported that they were under pressure not to report on
national-level issues or were subject to censorship.
Broadcasts
into the country from Russian television stations
represent the only significant source of independent
information from broadcast media and constitute a
frequent source of irritation to the Lukashenko
Government. However, to transmit their video
material to Moscow, Russian stations rely on the B-TR
broadcasting facility. According to Russian
television crews, authorities sometimes have limited
access to this facility.
On January 28,
in a politically-motivated case, ORT correspondent Pavel
Sheremet and cameraman Dmitriy Zavadskiy (both Belarusian
citizens) were found guilty of illegally crossing the
Belarusian-Lithuanian border in mid-1997. The two
were given suspended sentences of 2 years in
prison. Earlier in 1997, the authorities already
had stripped Sheremet of his accreditation as a
journalist because his reports contained
“intentional distortions of information about events
in the Republic of Belarus.” On March 13,
then-Foreign Minister Antanovich accused Russian
journalists of “misinformation, fabrications, and
libel” against President Lukashenko. Citing
the January convictions, authorities denied Sheremet
permission to travel abroad to receive an international
press freedom award in November from the Committee to
Protect Journalists.
On December
25, government security officers arrested approximately
10 persons, including journalists, at an unsanctioned
demonstration against closer integration with
Russia. On December 28, four of those detained were
sentenced to 5 days in prison each, two were fined, and
one was given an official warning.
A 1997 Council
of Ministers decree nullified the accreditation of all
correspondents and required all foreign media
correspondents to apply for reaccreditation with the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the application form for
accreditation requested biographic information, as well
as a record of the applicant’s journalistic
activity. Journalists who were residents of Belarus
were also required to register with the state tax
authorities. The impact of the decree is still
unclear, although it does not appear that the Government
specifically invoked the decree during the year as a tool
to exclude certain journalists.
In January
more stringent regulatory provisions, introduced by
amendments to the Law on Press and Other Mass Media that
were adopted by the Council of the Republic in December
1997, went into effect. The new regulatory
provisions grant greater authority to the Government to
ban and censor critical reporting. For example, the
State Committee on the Press was given authority to
suspend for 3 months publication of periodicals or
newspapers without a court ruling.
On March 17,
the presidential administration issued an internal
directive entitled “On Strengthening Countermeasures
against Articles in the Opposition Press.”
Specifically listing 10 independent media organizations
covered by these provisions, the directive prohibits
government officials from making comments or distributing
documents to non-state media and forbids state
enterprises from advertising in non-state media.
Although the directive does not restrict directly
independent media or impinge on the right of citizens to
receive information, it does restrict government
officials in speaking to the independent media and gives
further advantages to the state press.
In an open
letter to the authorities and representatives of the OSCE
in early April, the Belarusian Association of Journalists
protested the new directive, referring to it as
“anticonstitutional, antidemocratic, and
discriminatory.” On April 14, Narodnaya Volya
reported that the Ministry of Emergency Situations
refused to provide it with information about Chernobyl
cleanup workers because the newspaper is not
state-owned. In an attempt to limit independent
journalists’ access to information, authorities also
reportedly denied accreditation to them at a number of
events, including the Eighth Session of the
Belarusian-Russian Union Parliamentary Assembly held in
May and a state visit to Minsk in June by then-Russian
Prime Minister Sergey Kiryienko.
The
Government’s observance of academic freedom is
mixed. University students and academics are free
to pursue virtually any course of study or research.
Throughout the
year, the Government continued to harass students engaged
in antigovernment activities, like demonstrations.
Aleksey Shidlovskiy, who was sentenced in February to 2
years in a hard labor facility for allegedly spray
painting antipresidential graffiti, was expelled from his
university while in pretrial detention. Members of
the propresidential, government-funded Belarusian
Patriotic Union of Youth served as the regime’s
watchdog against antigovernment activities.
Moreover, there are reports that members of the Union
received preferential treatment at state schools.
In 1997, the
Council of Ministers issued a decree effective as of the
1997-98 academic year requiring students who receive free
university education from the State to accept jobs
assigned by the Government upon graduation. There
were no reports that the Government used this decree to
punish students engaged in antigovernment activities
during the year.
The Government
continued to close schools that teach in the Belarusian
language. According to the Belarusian League for
Human Rights, the number of schools that teach in
Belarusian has dropped by half since 1991.
Government authorities, on the other hand, claimed that
only schools that experienced diminishing enrollment have
been closed. However, the opposition-affiliated
Belarusian Language Society noted that the decline in the
percentage of first graders taught in
Belarusian—from 76 percent to 28 percent between
1993 and 1998—was evidence of a government policy to
promote education in Russian. In July, the Ministry
of Education replaced Vladimir Kolas, the director of the
Belarusian Humanities Lyceum (the only
Belarusian-language high school in Minsk) with a
Ministry-appointed educator. The move prompted
protests by students and parents who believed the
decision was part of a government campaign aimed at
ultimately shutting down the school. However, Kolas
was permitted to remain at the Lyceum in the capacity of
deputy director.
|
