Reporters without borders: Belarus tries to silence the most popular independent news site

The Belaru­sian author­i­ties are harass­ing the country’s most pop­u­lar news web­site, TUT.BY. Online access has been blocked, its Min­sk head­quar­ters have been searched and crim­i­nal pro­ceed­ings have been ini­ti­at­ed against the peo­ple who run it. Reporters With­out Bor­ders (RSF) con­demns the trumped-up charges used to silence this media out­let and calls for a firm UN reac­tion so that the right to inform is respect­ed in Belarus. 

Yes­ter­day was a dark day for TUT.BY, Belarus’s most wide­ly read inde­pen­dent media out­let. Police and offi­cials from the Depart­ment of Finan­cial Inves­ti­ga­tions (DFR) searched its offices in the cap­i­tal, Min­sk, in the morn­ing. Oth­er search­es were car­ried out at its region­al offices in Brest and Hrod­na, and at the homes of chief edi­tor Mari­na Zolo­to­va and oth­er jour­nal­ists.

At least 11 TUT.BY employ­ees were still being held this morn­ing, includ­ing Zolota­va, pub­lish­er Vol­ha Loy­ka, jour­nal­ist Ale­na Talk­a­cho­va and direc­tor-gen­er­al Lyud­mi­la Chek­ina. In a press release, the DFR said the media’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives were being pros­e­cut­ed for “tax fraud.” Arty­om May­orov, jour­nal­ist for the week­ly paper Belarusy i Rynok, who was arrest­ed when he went to cov­er the raid on TUT.BY’s Min­sk head­quar­ters, is also still detained.

Online access to TUT.BY, which has pro­vid­ed exten­sive cov­er­age of the protests since last August’s fraud­u­lent pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, has been blocked by the author­i­ties since yes­ter­day. The infor­ma­tion min­istry said it was blocked because of “mul­ti­ple media law vio­la­tions, includ­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of banned infor­ma­tion.”

“These accu­sa­tions have been trumped up in order to silence one of the country’s most pop­u­lar media out­lets,” said Jeanne Cave­li­er, the head of RSF’s East­ern Europe and Cen­tral Asia desk. “This large-scale offen­sive against TUT.BY is an alarm­ing new step towards the anni­hi­la­tion of inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and the com­plete con­trol of the media space desired by the author­i­ties. We call on the UN to react firm­ly in order to obtain the release of all jour­nal­ists impris­oned in Belarus and to ensure respect for the right to inform.”

The infor­ma­tion min­istry already stripped TUT.BY — 20 mil­lion vis­i­tors a day — of its sta­tus as a media last Jan­u­ary and its jour­nal­ists are con­stant­ly harassed by the author­i­ties.

In addi­tion to those arrest­ed after yesterday’s search­es, two oth­er TUT.BY jour­nal­ists are already detained. Lyubou Kasp­yarovich and Tat­syana Kapi­ton­a­va are serv­ing sen­tences of 15 days and 10 days in prison, respec­tive­ly, for “par­tic­i­pat­ing” in events they were cov­er­ing. Anoth­er TUT.BY jour­nal­ist, Kat­sya­ri­na Bary­se­vich, has just been released after serv­ing a six-month prison sen­tence for “divulging med­ical secrets” in a sto­ry about the death of an activist who had been beat­en by police.

The per­se­cu­tion of TUT.BY seems to con­firm an esca­la­tion in the harass­ment of Belarus’s media. A series of amend­ments to the media law and to the law on demon­stra­tions have pro­vid­ed a legal veneer to Belarus’s press vio­la­tions, while the judi­cial sys­tem, which fol­lows gov­ern­ment orders, has begun treat­ing the work of inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists as “extrem­ism.”

In the south­west­ern city of Brest, the local news­pa­per Intex-press was fined more than 1,400 euros on 5 May after pub­lish­ing an inter­view with Svi­at­lana Tsikhanouskaya, the lead­ing oppo­si­tion can­di­date in last August’s elec­tion, now liv­ing in self-imposed exile. The news­pa­per has not been print­ed since then. The local web­site Hrodna.life was fined 4,000 euros for pub­lish­ing infor­ma­tion about a Telegram chan­nel regard­ed as extrem­ist by the author­i­ties since last autumn.

With a state appa­ra­tus that does not hes­i­tate to mis­treat and tor­ture detained jour­nal­ists, Belarus is ranked 158th out of 180 coun­tries in RSF’s 2021 World Press Free­dom Index.