Spinner has gone, bad image has not
Exiled journalist OLGA BIRUKOVA says things are getting no better for journalists in her homeland of Belarus
EVEN THE top British PR guru Lord Bell hasn’t been able to improve the international image of Belarus, the worst country for persecuting journalists in Europe. Lord Bell’s much-criticised contract with Belarus expired in August and he is not renewing it.
Have Belarus officials learned how to deal with media in a civilised manner so they don’t need to pay for Bell’s wise advice anymore? I am afraid the answer is no.
A recent example: the deportation from the country of two journalists from a Russian TV channel, who were filming a story on politicians and former state personnel who disappeared without trace 10 years ago. They had been interviewing relatives, so it might have been easy to predict that officials would interrupt their activity.
The two journalists, Alexei Malkov and Yuri Babenko, disappeared themselves, from a hotel in Minsk, but turned up alive in Moscow. Yuri Babenko said later: “We noticed we were being followed by the KGB. We came back to the hotel, had dinner and went outside to smoke a cigarette.
“We noticed vans used for transportation of prisoners and later from inside the hotel we saw eight men in militia uniforms and about dozen in plain clothes coming toward us. They confiscated our equipment and materials, dragged us to a van and drove outside the capital to a wild forest.
“They interrogated us there, then transported us to the nearest point to the Russian border and we were forced to take a train to Moscow. They confiscated our sim cards so we couldn’t call anybody.”
During the interrogation they were asked why they had come to Belarus and whom had they interviewed and what about.
The Belarus Ministry of Information has said it had not ordered their deportation.
So Belarus has not, it seems, become more friendly to the media through the last year’s PR campaign by Lord Bell.