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Belarusian journalist Iryna Khalip details dissident life

Belarusian journalist Iryna Khalip details dissident life

Award-winning reporter speaks ahead of Day of the Imprisoned Writer event in Dublin.

It is 2010 and journalist Iryna Khalip is sitting at a press conference in Minsk, Belarus, where incumbent president Alexander Lukashenko - who has held office since 1994 – is taking questions in advance of the presidential election later in the year, the Irish Times reports.

“I was asking very tough questions,” recalls Khalip. “I asked him about the fate of [people who had been] abducted and killed. I explained that the whole world knew it was his initiative to eliminate the opposition.

“He tried to be nice. He told me, ‘Iryna, I am good. I am a good guy. Believe me. You are free. You are sitting here and you can do everything you want to do.’

“But I know that he remembered everything. Every word. After some years, he took a chance for revenge, because my arrest and all [of] this nightmare, I am sure it was about personal revenge.”

Khalip is a Belarusian journalist and editor of the Minsk bureau of Novaya Gazeta, one of the last independent media organisations in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. She has been the recipient of several awards for her work in the fields of journalism and human rights.

In Dublin, ahead of Day of the Imprisoned Writer, an event organised by Front Line Defenders in association with Irish PEN and the Dublin Book Festival, she talks to The Irish Times about her experiences as a journalist in Belarus under Lukashenko’s rule.

She says Lukashenko’s “personal revenge” against her is because he “hates independent people, hates those who aren’t afraid of him, and hates those who can speak and write openly”.

She also says that the attacks on her family were motivated by how “bankrupt” Lukashenko’s own personal life is, as his wife refused to move to Minsk when he came to power. “He couldn’t forgive us for being happy, for loving each other, and for having a son grow up with two parents,” she says. “Lukashenko did his best to eliminate our family.”

Those efforts involved the bugging of her phone, cyber attacks, death threats, and incarceration. “The KGB follow me very openly,” she says. “Some years ago I was investigating the relationship between Lukashenko, the Belarusian KGB, and Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky.

“An article was written and sent to my Moscow office. Ten minutes [later] I received a letter from an unknown email address signed ‘Boris Berezovsky’. It read, ‘Darling, if this article is published, you will meet Anna Politkovskaya that same day.’ Politkovskaya was my colleague from Novaya Gazeta who was killed in 2006.

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