BAJ: Scale of crackdown against certain journalists and editorial boards was unprecedented

The presidential campaign of 2010 has drastically changed the situation of independent mass media.

The 8th congress of the Belarusian Association of Journalists is held in Minsk on May 18. Before the event participants had received provocative letters with libel about the leadership of the BAJ. It was stated by the chairperson of the organisation Zhana Litvina during opening of the forum.

“Two days before the forum most of you started to receive “presents” to your email addresses, in the form of shameful, libelous mailout, which aim was to discredit the leadership of the BAJ once again.

I do not exclude that the openness with which we had been collecting and posting at our website critical comments about the BAJ leaders, has provoked emergence of this mailout: it had been viewed as a sign that the organisation could be blasted from within,” Zhana Litvina said.

“I see certain logics in that: a year and a half ago the wave of discrediting hit political opponents of the regime. The next attack was faced by human rights organisations (Ales Byalyatski, who is still behind the bars, fell the victim of this attack). It is possible that the time of tsunami has come, and it is to sweep away the BAJ and the entire independent journalistic community… Friends, think about that! It depends on you today what kind of organisation it will be tomorrow,” chairperson of the BAJ said.

As it is noted in the report of the congress, according to the BAJ, the main political event which had drastically changed the situation of independent mass media, is the presidential campaign of 2010. It became unprecedented in its scale of crackdown against individual journalists and entire editorial boards, the BAJ press-service informs.

7 criminal cases were opened against journalists and members of the BAJ then. Some of them – Syarhei Vaznyak, Alyaksandr Fyaduta, Iryna Khalip – are still kept under surveillance. A member of the BAJ Council Paval Sevyarynets is serving the term in the special settlement in the village of Kuplin. And the editor-in-chief of Charter’97 Natalya Radzina had been forced to leave the country.

During and after the election journalists experienced beating, searches, threats, criminal cases opened against them. A reporter of a Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, Andrzej Poczobut, was charged with libel against the president for critical materials published in the newspaper and on the web. The journalist from Hrodna was sentenced to 3 years’ imprisonment with a respite and released in the court room.

In 2012 six members of the BAJ, including Litvina, were put on the black list of persons who are banned from leaving Belarus.

The Belarusian Association of Journalists is an NGO founded in 1995. Since 1997 the BAJ is an associated member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). In 2003 the World Association of Newspaper awarded the BAJ with the Golden Pen of Freedom prize. In December 2004 the European Parliament gave the BAJ Andrei Sakharov Prize “For Freedom of Thought”.

In 2011 the organisation was awarded the Freedom Prize of the Atlantic Council. The BAJ has 1030 members.