A rough couple weeks over there (8/31/05)

It's been a rough several weeks.

Not here. There.

Here, things have been just short of spectacular. Sure, we could use some rain. But we enjoyed a great Jay County Fair and a bigger-than-ever engine show. Meanwhile, we've had wonderful visits with family and friends. Life has been good.

But things are often different on the other side of the world, as the news from Iraq reminds us daily.

In my own case, there refers to the countries in the former Soviet Union, where I've been working off and on with newspapers and their journalists for the past seven years.

There, things have been rough indeed.

The bad news comes via e-mail, and it never seems to be counter-balanced by good news.

First came word that the boys in Temirtau are in trouble.

Temirtau's an ugly, polluted, industrial city in north central Kazakhstan. It's also home to a publication — the name translates as Evening Gazette — which is trying to be a real community newspaper. I first visited the city and worked with the paper back in 2002 and wrote about it then. Since that time, things seem to have gone pretty well.

But now my buddies Sascha and Vyascheslav have hit a wall.

According to an outfit called the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, the Kazakh National Security Committee's regional department has filed a lawsuit against the Temirtau paper and one other, claiming that their reporting on a suspended sentence handed down to a corrupt police official defamed his "honor and reputation."

You can forget worrying about how a corrupt cop has any honor and reputation to defame. That doesn't factor into the equation.

It's not clear how it's all going to play out, but there will at least be hefty fines, and there may be worse.

I'd barely digested that bad news when I was hit by a double-whammy last week.

On Thursday, one of the newspapers I've been working with in Belarus was ordered closed and another I'd worked with in Tajikistan saw its editor facing criminal penalties.

In Tajikistan, Mukhtor Bokizoda was sentenced to two years of "corrective labor." He's also been fined and had his salary garnished. Mukhtor is the head of something called the Foundation for the Memory and Protection of Journalists, which was created after the Tajik civil war.

He's also editor and publisher of a paper whose name translates as The Power of the Word.

His "crime"? Getting tangled in the Tajik web of tax laws, which are arbitrarily enforced and often contradictory.

In Belarus, where I hope to be returning in late October, the government concocted a case based upon technical minutiae to liquidate a paper — Courier of Borisov — which had the audacity to be successful in the face of subsidized government competition. It will officially cease to exist in January, but it's really dead as of last week. The editor, Liudmila Ochenashenko, has been replaced by the local head of government ideology.

It was just last May when I visited Borisov, met Liudmila’s boss, and did some training for the newspaper’s staff.

As I said, it's been a rough period.

Often, I tell people that I do this crazy work overseas because it's so rewarding. And that's true.

But it's also true that the work is occasionally frustrating, disheartening, and maddening.

So if I've seemed a little distracted lately, it has nothing to do with the fair or the engine show or even the need for rain.

It's not a problem of here. It's a problem of there.[[In-content Ad]]