Norwegian journalists express solidarity with Yauhen Merkis

The three-day meet­ing host­ed as many as 300 peo­ple – both full-time jour­nal­ists and free­lancers who work with Nor­we­gian media.

Among the par­tic­i­pants were also jour­nal­ists from oth­er coun­tries based in Nor­way at the moment and who for var­i­ous rea­sons can not go to their home­land: Iraq, Pak­istan, Afghanistan, Belarus, and Ukraine.

“I have a 20-year back­ground in jour­nal­ism, and recent­ly I worked in tele­vi­sion. When the war start­ed in Ukraine, I had to evac­u­ate with my three chil­dren. Of course, I lost my job,” said one of the par­tic­i­pants and a Kharkiv res­i­dent Yev­ge­nia Baboshko.

In the ten months of the war in Ukraine, Yev­ge­nia met with fel­low media work­ers at the con­fer­ence for the first time. It was a breath of fresh air for her, it was inter­est­ing to learn how fel­low jour­nal­ists work and to adopt their expe­ri­ence, the woman admit­ted. Now the jour­nal­ist is learn­ing the Nor­we­gian lan­guage and hopes to find a job in her field. But Yev­geniya doesn’t want to stay in Nor­way for long: she intends to return to her native city.

“Nor­we­gian jour­nal­ists are sim­i­lar to the Ukrain­ian ones – socia­ble and live­ly. Of course, it is felt that their asso­ci­a­tion can afford more finan­cial­ly – that makes them more sus­tain­able. Inter­est­ing­ly, this year they even decid­ed to give a prize to free­lancer Per Chris­t­ian Selmer-Ander­ssen. He was in Ukraine when the war start­ed and cre­at­ed some arti­cles for the Nor­we­gian media,” com­ment­ed on the event Yulia Alher­chyk from Belarus.

Yulia not­ed that Nor­we­gian jour­nal­ists are aware of the events that took place in Belarus after the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and of Belaru­sian jour­nal­ists who are now behind bars.

“Odd­run Midt­bø, a Nor­we­gian jour­nal­ist, is a very active advo­cate of Belaru­sian jour­nal­ists. By the way, it was thanks to her that I got to the con­fer­ence in Bergen. Her Face­book page is full of posts about Belaru­sian impris­oned jour­nal­ists, and she brought a stack of por­traits of human rights defend­er Ales Biali­ats­ki and jour­nal­ist Yauhen Merkis to the con­fer­ence. When I told the Nor­we­gians about the pecu­liar­i­ties of our work in Belarus and the deten­tion con­di­tions of jour­nal­ists, they were shocked and react­ed very emo­tion­al­ly,” added Yulia.

Free­lance jour­nal­ist and leader of the EFJ Free­lance Expert Group (FREG) Odd­run Midt­bø said that in 2017 she was in Min­sk and met Belaru­sian jour­nal­ists there. Has felt great inter­est and sym­pa­thy for her Belaru­sian col­leagues ever since.

“I know that many Belaru­sian jour­nal­ists are in prison. I always ask to dis­cuss these issues at the nation­al and Euro­pean lev­els. Today, I sin­gled out Ales and Yauhen. The first one won the Nobel Peace Prize. And the lat­ter is not only my per­son­al acquain­tance: he is well known to some Scan­di­na­vians,” said Odd­run.

The next Haust­stor­men will be held in Nor­way in 2024.