Losing fight to keep information flowing (11/16/05)

Roman is smiling because an old friend has arrived in town. There’s little other reason to smile.

The town is Smorgon, a city of about 20,000 in northern Belarus, a place where Roman has been putting out a paper since 1996.

Next April would be the tenth anniversary of the paper — known as Novaya Gazeta Smorgonya — but there will be no celebration.

The paper has been murdered.

It’s just one of the more recent casualties in the ongoing effort by the regime of Alexander Lukashenka to silence dissenting voices, an effort which will get worse in the months between now and next October’s presidential election.

In Belarus today, those in power have a number of levers they can use to control the news media: Access to information, which is profoundly limited; the legal system, which is full of snares involving arcane tax and registration requirements and which does not admit truth as a defense in libel suits; the state printing house, which acts as ultimate censor on which papers — and which articles — make it into print; the state distribution system, which has a near-monopoly on newsstand sales; the post office, which controls all subscription information and which can decide not to list certain newspapers as available for subscription; and, that old stand-by, physical violence. Belarus today is a country where journalists, as well as newspapers, are murdered.

In Roman’s case, the trouble started back in 2002 and 2003, when his paper started reporting more on local politics, including those politicians who didn’t agree with everything the local authorities did.

By last spring, when I first visited Smorgon, the newspaper was literally operating under a pseudonym, publishing as the local edition of another newspaper, when legal hurdles made it impossible to publish under the original name.

But, finally, on Aug. 4, even that came to an end.

The newspaper published its final edition that day, though Roman talks of putting together a compilation of local articles for next April’s lost anniversary.

Some would blame Roman’s problem on his interest in politics, but even those newspapers which soft-peddle coverage and often self-censor are vulnerable.

In Ivatsevichi, in the western part of the country, a newspaper by the name of Gazeta dlya Vas (Newspaper for You) will probably be closed before the end of the year.

Journalistically, it’s not much to write home about. But there’s something heroic about its struggle to hang on.

Lyudmila, the middle-aged editor-in-chief, leads an incredibly young team, operating under extremely difficult circumstances. With offices in a two-story building it shares with a dressmaker, the staff has to assemble each issue by hand. Four page sections of the tabloid are printed separately, then put together to make a full edition.

When the question of the future is raised, Lyudmila takes us away from her young team, worried that her frankness will upset them. We sit in a room full of remnants and bolts of fabric. No office is available.

The sad truth is, she says, the paper will close soon. Its crime: It exists.

That’s enough for the local chief of ideology — yes, there’s an official in charge of what you should believe — to insist that the paper be shut down. His tactic is a legal maneuver which will effectively evict the paper from the building.

The editorial offices could re-locate to an apartment somewhere, but the advertising offices could not, and officials are making sure no one is willing to rent the space that’s needed.

The paper is 10 years old, not even an adolescent as these things go.

But you can tell from the look in Lyudmila’s eyes that its days are numbered.[[In-content Ad]]