Helpless feeling will not go away

One of my favorite Neil Young songs has a plaintive refrain: “Helpless! Helpless! Helpless!”

Nothing else could sum up my mood at the moment better than that.

At Rotary the other day, Vivian Morehous asked me about my friends and colleagues in Myanmar. She was referring both to folks at The Irrawaddy, a news website I tried to help out for about nine months, and to journalists who had participated in training sessions I conducted in 2012.

“They are in hiding,” I said, “and there’s nothing I can do to help them. I am completely helpless.”

That helplessness is even greater when it comes to Belarus, where I conducted journalism training sessions in 2005.

At least three of my friends there are now behind bars. They are likely to stay there under the rule of Alexander Lukashenka for a long, long time.

Last week I learned that Andrei Aliaksandrau, a talented young editor I worked with, is facing even more grave criminal charges than when he was first arrested.

Andrei was part of a group of about 20 Belarusian journalists who traveled to Warsaw, Poland, for a weeklong seminar I helped to conduct for the International Center for Journalists. He was working at the time for a paper in Novapolatsk, but he had greater ambitions.

He was also a participant in a seminar I presented in Minsk on “training the trainer,” and something must have stuck. He has gone on since 2005 to do journalism training on his own.

In January, he was arrested on charges of “organizing actions that grossly violate public order.” What he was doing was helping to pay the fines of protesters opposed to the Lukashenka regime so they could get out of jail.

Now the stakes have been raised.

The charge today is high treason. The potential penalty is 15 years in prison.

Here’s a link to the website of the Belarusian Association of Journalists that spells out the details: shorturl.at/mMU28

Back in 2005 when I was conducting that seminar on “training the trainers,” we were using the offices of Komsomolskaya Pravda’s Belarus edition. And its editor was listening in.

Her name is Yulia Slutskaya, and she went on to found Press Club Belarus, which not only provided training on international standards but also served as a gathering place for reporters and editors where they could share ideas and vent their frustrations about attempting to do their jobs in an authoritarian society.

She was arrested at the end of 2020. So was her son, Peter, whom I met when I had dinner at the Slutskaya apartment in Minsk. Peter was a kid at the time, but he’d been to the U.S. on numerous occasions as part of an exchange program and had a sophisticated understanding of the world.

Now, more than seven months after their arrest, I worry every day about how they are holding up.

Here’s a link to a powerful video from the Belarusian Association of Journalists about what Yulia has meant to the effort to establish sustainable independent press in her country: shorturl.at/ilmG2

The arrests of Yulia and Peter and Andrei and dozens of others have been recounted and recorded.

But the Lukashenka regime is unrelenting.

And I keep hearing Neil Young’s plaintive cry all day long.