Reporters Without Borders has condemned the Belarusian foreign ministry’s refusal on 28 May to issue accreditation to reporter Alyaksey Minchonak of Radio Racyja, a station based in the Polish city of Bialystok that broadcasts to Belarus. This latest obstacle for the station comes a month after the police raided its Minsk bureau and seized equipment.
“The authorities are continuing to harass Radio Racyja, one of the few independent news outlets in Belarus,” the press freedom organisation said. “We call for an end to this administrative persecution, which is motivated solely by political considerations.”
Minchonak was summoned to the foreign ministry on 28 May and was told his request for accreditation had been turned down on the grounds that he had already begun to work without permission.
The decision was “absurd,” Minchonak told Reporters Without Borders. “One the one hand, the foreign ministry targets us for working without accreditation, while on the other hand it continues to refuse our requests.”
The police still have not returned the five computers and other equipment they seized in the raid on Radio Racyja’s Minsk bureau a month ago. The pretext for the raid was the station’s alleged role in creating animated cartoons posted on the Internet in 2005, which were deemed to have insulted President Alexandre Lukashenko.
Radio Racyja was launched in 1999 by the Polish government and the Dutch embassy in Warsaw. Its repeated requests for accreditation in Belarus have always been rejected by the foreign ministry. It broadcasts from Poland and has a network of correspondents in Belarus who work without accreditation. It often criticises the government, unlike Belarus’ own state-controlled radio stations.
(Source: Reporters Without Borders)
on May 31st, 2008 at 16:54
As usual, Reporters Without Borders are full of self-righteous wrath and condemnation. I wish they’d get their facts straight before posting such dramatic press releases, though.
R.Racja’s Minsk bureau was shut down because it didn’t have any legal status in the country. The cartoons had nothing to do with that. In most countries, foreign mass media must be accredited first. R.Racja never bothered about applying for such a permit before. Only after running into a legal trouble did they try getting an accreditation.
BTW, the Belarusian journalists who work for R.Racja in Poland complain that they lack formal accreditation in that country, too. According to Polish press, one of them, Alexander Burakov, was recently fired for questioning R.Racja program policies. Other journalists are openly supportive of him. As a result, the station might be deadlocked in a labor dispute soon.
The Dutch Embassy in Warsaw launched the station? First time I hear about that. The funding sources of R.Racja are murky but it appears that Warsaw has succeded in getting some major EU underwriting for this Polish project.
The EU money was mostly waisted, of course. The US-run Freedom House “recently found that not only the broadcasting infrastructure of Radio Racja was not sufficient to cover a meaningful part of the country, and the signal was weak and fluctuating but it also failed to capture a significant audience. Its programming did not manage to appeal to broader informational needs in Belarus, thus hampering the long-term sustainability of domestic listenership.”