Nikolai Markevich: No Regime Managed to Annihilate Freedom of Speech :: Charter'97 :: News

Seminar “Freedom of speech in Belarus: yesterday, today, tomorrow”, organized by the closed newspaper “Pagonya”, Swedish PEN-Center (with a support from the “Swedish Institute” and some Swedish medias, took place on June 28-29 in Grodno. The local authorities sought to thwart the seminar, forbidding to hold it at the “Neman” tourist base. So, the organizers had to urgently look for another location.

Famous journalists, human rights defenders and lawyers read out their reports at the seminar. For instance, head of the center for legal protection of journalists of the Belarusian Association of Journalists Mikhail Pastukhov, deputy chair of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee Garry Pogonailo, Grodno journalist and writer Sergei Ostrovtsov, journalist from Sweden Nils Funke, doctor of history, professor of the Grodno state university Svetlena Kul-Selverstova and others.

As said in a conversation with the BelaPAN correspondent by the editor of the closed newspaper “Pagonya” Nikolai Markevich, “the seminar’s conclusion on today’s freedom of speech developments in Belarus seems very poignant – it is no invention of the ruling Belarusian regime. In fact, this is but an automatic application of those traditions, which had been in wide use in the Russian empire all throughout XIX century and then were transformed by the Stalinist regime for the purposes of the Soviet totalitarianism. And today they apply them here.”

The seminar’s participants passed an appeal to the Belarusian public, the country’s leadership and the international community. They also congratulated Nikolai Markevich – on June 29 the man turned 40. The journalist said that despite the sentence he feels a free man.