Argument Over a Million: American publisher against “BDG” :: Charter'97 :: News

Last week the court of Kastrychnitski district of Minsk valued the moral damage to the editor-in-chief of the New York – based newspaper “Russkaya Amerika” at 60 million rubles. The American editor-in-chief had demanded 1 million dollars as a compensation for libellous information about him by deputy editor-in-chief of the “Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta” Iryna Khalip in her article “Oklahoma Would Never Learn About Lukashenka”. According to the decision of the court, Iryna Khalip is to pay compensation to Arkadiy Mar amounting to 10 million rubles (more than 4,500 USD), and the private unitary enterprise “Marat” is to pay 50 million rubles (about 23,000 USD).

- Mar states that before getting an approval for interviewing Lukashenka, the Belarusian side had thoroughly studied him and the “Russkaya Amerika”. That is why Mr. Mar could not understand why an informational war had been unleashed against him by your statement on RTVI TV channel.

- God forbid! I have not announced the war to Mr. Mar, especially on RTVI! As for him and the “Russkaya Amerika”, I cannot exclude that he considers his newspaper a serious one. But Mar is substituting notions! He argues that I called his newspaper a non-existent one.

- And besides you said about him that he is just an invention, and in reality he does not exist…

- It is possible that he exists as some citizen with a passport. But the whole story and his role in it is one big invention. Mar argues that I had called his newspaper a non-existent one. Nothing of the kind! There were no such words in the text! On the contrary, I wrote that there are several newspapers with the same title, “Russkaya Amerika”. And that Oklahoma-based “Russkaya Amerika”, which can be found anywhere, including Washington library of the Congress, the newspaper that had been sent by the US State Department on the request of the US Embassy in Minsk, had never interviewed Lukashenka. Moreover, in Belarus Mr. Mar sincerely told to the newspaper “Vecherniy Brest”, that his newspaper is distributed for free in beauty parlors, supermarkets of Queens and so on. I am sorry, but if the Belarusian side had studied the situation with the newspaper, and found it possible that the interview with the head of state would be used as curlpapers by ladies for in beauty parlors of Brooklyn and Queens, and that fish would be wrapped in the newspaper in supermarkets, I am absolutely right in my article, stating that the Belarusian PR people had goofed. It is understandable that what is done by night appears by day, and the head of any state, including North Korea, cannot give an interview to such a newspaper because of his status. And local PR people, whom Lukashenka had apparently been asking to organize an interview in some influential Western newspaper all these years, just had used the chance and followed his order.

- Arkadiy Mar claims that his interview with Lukashenka would run the informational blockade, and that other American journalists would come after him. Do you agree with that?

- Would it run the informational blockade? In Queens?! In fact, this interview is to ruin reputation of Mar as a person who escaped from the totalitarian Soviet system and arrived to free America, and now he take steps to support regimes condemned even by the UN. After this interview nobody would come here. Neither Mar, nor the Belarusian side should count on it.