Swedish MP Calls for Release of Journalists, Fair Elections :: Charter'97 :: News

“Sentencing journalists to exiled labor is absurd,” said MP Cecilia Wigström of the Swedish Liberal Party after her five-day visit in Belarus.

Mrs Wigström, who is a Swedish delegate to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and member of its Committee on Human Rights and Democracy, on Saturday met with Viktor Ivashkevich, former editor-in-chief of the newspaper Rabochy, in the city of Baranovichi where he is serving a two-year sentence for slandering the president.

Mrs Wigström is not able to comment on the content of the article for which Mr Ivashkevich was sentenced, which dealt with corruption in the presidential administration, but observes that his punishment is totally out of proportion to his alleged crime.

“Belarus must stop jailing people for these types of legal misdemeanors,” she said.

Mrs Wigström also called for the immediate release of all three journalists currently serving such sentences, which besides Mr Ivashkevich are Pavel Mazheyka and Mikola Markevich of the newspaper Pagonya.

Another type of human rights abuse the Swedish MP noted in conjunction with the local elections that took place on Sunday.

Mrs Wigström followed the elections closely in two districts in the Leninskiy Rayon in Minsk. In one of them, the real number of early voters seems to have been multiplied by several times. When domestic observers managed to force commissions in two out of eight polling stations to count early and election day votes separately, the result was strange. Election day votes showed a large majority for the opposition candidate Sergey Kazlovskiy, while early votes gave about 90 percent to his opponent, an officer of the Interior Ministry riot police forces.

Other peculiarities reported from the two districts include ballot boxes opened during the night, as well as a commission member putting piles of bulletins in the box despite the presence of observers.
- The types of violations that we followed at close hand could later be confirmed by the human rights organization Vesna. They had received similar reports from all over the country, said Mrs Wigström.

Before the election day, the Swedish MP had met with a number of individuals and organisations involved, including both the opposition and the Secretary of the Central Electoral Commission Nikolay Lozovik.

- We told the Secretary that in the outside world there is little trust towards Belarusian elections. Mr Lozovik claimed he was aware that there are problems, but would not confess to the extent of those, said Mrs Wigström.

Mrs Wigström also met with the head of the newly opened OSCE office in Minsk, Mr Eberhard Heyken. One of the issues discussed at the meeting was the approval of the Belarusian parliament into the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. According to Mrs Wigström, this should not be considered as a sign of softer relations with Belarus, but the contrary.

- Now, work must commence on changing the Belarusian electoral legislation. To minimise fraud extensive international observation should also take place at the parliamentary elections in 2004, as well as in a possible referendum on allowing Lukashenko to run for a third term, said Mrs Wigström.
As for the Belarusian opposition, Mrs Wigström is positive to their decision to participate in the local elections.

- Surely, they have the right to feel disappointment and frustration, although many of them had expected this outcome. I only hope that their enthusiasm and their strength will be enough to fight more battles in coming elections, said the Swedish MP.