Forcible subscription for state-run mass media: lists of “objectors” are made (Photo of the document)

Subscription for state-run mass media in Belarus has always been forced, but now this campaign has acquired an unprecedented character.

Ideology departments of regional executive committees are trying to rescue the situation with subscription for state-run newspapers in a peculiar way. As the European Radio for Belarus informs, the head of the department Ihar Lapikau had sent a letter to heads of departments and units of the regional executive committee with a request to furnish with information about how employees had subscribed to “Sovetskaya Belorussiya” and “Slonimskiy vestnik”.

Besides, senior officials are offered to make one more list, the list of those who failed to subscribe for the state-run newspapers. Probably the aim is to hold conversations about the low level of ideological awareness.

However such activities in the run-up to the subscription campaigns are no wonder, and so Belarusians have got accustomed to them. And many of them face compulsory subscription every year.

As charter97.org website informs, earlier journalists received a copy of “The Plan of action in the subscription campaign concerning printed media for the first half of the year 2009”.

The document included measures for increasing print run of regional state newspapers, prevention of a lower number of subscribers for local and national state-run newspapers, the Belarusian Association of Journalists informed.

In particular, officials of the Brest region are prescribed to hold consultations with directors of enterprises and institutions dedicated to organising a subscription campaign in labour collectives. In their turn, heads of enterprises and organisers of all forms of ownership must “prevent reducing of circulation of main republican newspapers, state-run regional and district newspapers”.

The “plan” has a paragraph which obliges directors to make provisions for subscription for printed mass media by every employee “with the aim to expand the informational space and to support spiritual and moral development of the population”.

Workers of the post offices had been given a task to “report” the ideology department about the progress of the subscription campaign to every week. And besides they are to give the statistics about enterprises and organisations which hasn’t subscribed or where subscription figures are lower to the regional executive committee.

In this way state-run newspapers receive money of subscribers. And it’s big money. But subscribers receive waste paper not needed by them, as they hadn’t wanted to subscribe for these newspapers. And they are unlikely to read them.