Belarus: will the tide ever turn on Lukashenko and the regime’s repression?

On August 9, Belarus commemorates the sad anniversary of the 2020
presidential elections, which resulted in the fraudulent
reelection of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko. In the
aftermath of the elections, Belarus experienced unprecedented
levels of repression at the hands of the Lukashenko regime’s
security services, with part of this violence targeting
independent media and journalists.


In July, Belarus also marked the 30th anniversary of Lukashenko’s
first election, in 1994. This anniversary served as a reminder of
the fact that the Belarusian dictator has now been in power for
over 30 years, with no end in sight to the repression against
media and civil society carried out by authorities under his
leadership over the past three decades.


While the mass protest movement in Belarus, in 2020 and 2021,
took many by surprise at the time, and was widely reported on by
European media, this attention almost completely faded in the
past years, especially following Russia’s full-scale invasion of
Ukraine on 24 February 2022.


However, Belarusian media, and civil society at large, continue
to suffer from massive repression by local authorities. With
nearly 40 journalists currently in prison according to monitoring
by the Belarusian Association of Journalists, an independent
trade union in exile, the scale of repression in Belarus is
immense.


Moreover, the repression continues to escalate, with more and
more independent media regularly  designated as “extremist”
and banned in Belarus. Most worryingly, these designations
foresee prison terms not only for journalists, but also for
regular Belarusians who engage with independent media content.


In this context, despair could seem natural for independent
Belarusian journalists, most of whom are in exile in neighboring
Poland and Lithuania, as well as in Georgia and other European
countries. However, these journalists continue their work despite
obvious difficulties, managing to keep audiences despite access
blocks and other bans in Belarus.


To discuss the present and future of Belarus and its independent
journalists, IPI spoke to Natalia Radzina, the editor-in-chief of
Charter’97, one of Belarus’s oldest and most popular online
independent media outlets.


Guest: Natalia Radzina, Editor-in-Chief of Charter’97.


Producer and Host: Karol Łuczka, Eastern Europe Advocacy and
Monitoring Officer at IPI.


Voice-over: Beatrice Choccioli, Europe Advocacy Officer at
IPI.


Editor: Javier Luque, Head of Digital Communications at IPI.


Other episodes in this series:


Press freedom in peril: navigating elections and political
turmoil in Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria Media Freedom in Focus:
Untangling media capture in Greece MFRR in Focus: Opposition wins
Poland election


 


Related links:


Belarus: IPI condemns prison sentences for two more journalists
Serbia: MFRR partners demand Belgrade court set Belarusian
journalist free Belarus: IPI condemns prison sentences handed to
two more journalists