Mind has been traveling to Belarus

“Are you in Belarus again?” asked my wife.

I nodded.

Physically, I was in our living room, sitting in a wing-back chair with a laptop in front of me.

But emotionally and mentally, I have been in Belarus — an often-forgotten country tucked between Poland and Russia — for weeks.

Those include the weeks leading up to the presidential election as Alexander Lukashenka — dubbed by President George W. Bush as “the last dictator in Europe” — sought to extend his 26-year rule.

The run-up was pretty much Lukashenka’s norm. His opponents were jailed or not allowed on the ballot.

But this time, something different happened.

Three women whose husbands had been imprisoned to prevent their challenge to Lukashenka’s rule banded together. One of them managed to get on the ballot. The other two joined her in an unprecedented campaign that drew tens of thousands to rallies all over the country.

It was a huge outpouring of support, and when the rigged election results were announced and Lukashenka was reported to have received 80% of the vote, the people went to the street.

And when people went to the street, the beatings and arrests began. Tear gas, flash bombs, truncheons and rubber bullets were the order of the day for the riot police.

Last time I checked, about 7,000 protesters had been detained in prison at some point. Reports of torture are an everyday occurrence.

So why does a sorta-retired newspaper publisher in Indiana care about this?

The answer to that goes back 15 years.

Someone at the State Department, hoping to change the situation in Belarus, decided that improving media independence would be an important first step.

A project dubbed “Media Excellence in Belarus” was launched by the International Center for Journalists with funding from State.

It was an ambitious project, and at first I was supposed to be one tiny part of it. But that changed as things played out.

The first step was to bring eight Belarusian journalists to the U.S. for a week-long training seminar. I was a part of that, along with my friend and colleague the late George Krimsky.

But after the first day of training, George — who was supposed to be the lead dog — announced that he had to step away. He’d do the training in Washington, but that was it.

He told us at dinner, and I think I dropped my fork.

I was “next man up” and before I knew it I had agreed to take that lead dog position.

After the training in D.C., the eight were sent to professional internships at newspapers all over the United States to sharpen their skills.

Then, in May of 2005, I found myself in Warsaw, Poland, with one of the International Center for Journalists’s top trainers, conducting a week-long workshop for an expanded group that included the seven of the original eight but added 10 more.

Why Poland? Because the paranoid dictator at the helm of Belarus would not allow that sort of training within his country’s borders.

And the training in Poland was just the start. When it concluded, I took the Warsaw-Minsk night train with seminar participants back to their home country. To say it was an unusual trip would be an understatement. I shared a tiny compartment with three female Belarusian journalists, sleeping on a top bunk while hoping that I wouldn’t be arrested at the border.

Once there, I worked with the Belarusian Association of Journalists, visiting the newspapers of the seminar participants, conducting on-the-fly consulting sessions and mini-seminars.

We did our best to stay under the radar. I stayed at a place called The House of Mercy, a guest house maintained by the Orthodox Church, while in Minsk and at a Catholic guest house when we were staying overnight in Baranavich.

Two weeks of that and I was pooped. But in the fall it was time for a follow-up trip. That one was even more exhausting.

The newspaper venues visited that time spanned the map of the country: Grodno, Borisov, Novopolatsk, Minsk, Smorgon, Glubokoye, Vitebsk, Bobruisk, Molodechno, Slonim, Volkovysk and Brest.

And maybe others.

I’ve come up with those names because I’ve been re-reading my final report and my journals. And I’ve been looking at photos of my fellow journalists there.

Some — perhaps many — of those newspapers are gone.

But this summer’s events provide hope that others have taken their place.

I’ll keep spending part of my day in Belarus to see how this plays out.

Fingers crossed.

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Editor’s note: For accurate information about events in Belarus, go to rfe/rl.org, spring95.org, or baj.by.