Voicing an opinion led to prison

The news came two days before Christmas.

Yulia Slutskaya had been detained by Belarusian authorities. Arrested, in other words.

They grabbed her when she returned to Belarus after an out-of-the-country visit to her daughter and grandchildren. Picked up at the airport, she was whisked to one of the many places of imprisonment that the government of Alexander Lukashenka has at its disposal.

Those places of imprisonment have been pretty full since August when the people of Belarus rejected the officially announced results of a presidential election. The official tally said Lukashenka received 80% of the re-election vote. The people said, “Nonsense.” Or, more likely, something harsher.

Protest marches were launched and were met with escalating levels of violence by security forces. Beatings have been routine. Tales of torture have become commonplace.

But the opposition hasn’t stopped.

Lukashenka has been in power for 26 years, and it hasn’t been pretty. Political opponents take their lives in their hands.

Merely voicing the opinion that you’d like to live in a country where the president’s political opponents don’t disappear can get you arrested.

In Yulia’s case, the charge is tax evasion.

While that sounds criminal, it’s a pretty standard charge for non-governmental organizations that receive grant support from the West. When an authoritarian regime wants to silence critics, the easiest way is to go after those who receive assistance from the European Union or the U.S.

Yulia, as founder of the Belarus Press Club, may as well have had a target on her back. She had to know that sooner or later the Lukashenka government would come after her.

We met in the fall of 2005, and I was lucky not to be arrested myself at the time.

Lukashenka had issued a presidential decree banning exactly the sort of work I was doing: Conducting training and holding seminars to promote independent journalism, consulting with editors and publishers about how they could wend their way through the authoritarian minefield.

Despite the ban, the work went on, though I tried to keep a low profile.

Yulia, at that point, was managing editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda’s Belarus edition. It was the successor to a hugely popular Soviet publication that was trying to make the transition in a post-Soviet world.

One of Yulia’s top reporters — Galina Malishevskaya — had taken part in training I’d conducted in Washington and in Warsaw, Poland, for the International Center for Journalists. Galina had opened the doors to Komsomolskaya Pravda, and Yulia was receptive. I met with her staff and did a session on “training the trainer” in the newspaper’s offices.

Something must have clicked.

In 2011, Yulia founded Belarus Press Club to provide a gathering place for journalists and a platform for training sessions and interaction with officials and experts from Western Europe.

That was more than enough to get her on Lukashenka’s radar.

As protests have continued, his government has increasingly targeted any organization that promotes democracy, press freedom and human rights. This latest crackdown was inevitable.

And there currently is no end in sight.

As I write this, Yulia is being held in one of the most notorious prisons in Minsk. What was initially a 72-hour detention is now apparently open-ended.

So I check the websites daily — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Belarusian Association of Journalists, and Viasna, the leading human rights organization in Belarus — hoping for some news.