Liberalization Is Over?

Dur­ing the last cou­ple of years Belaru­sian gov­ern­ment tried to improve rela­tions with the West – polit­i­cal pris­on­ers were released, peo­ple were no longer arrest­ed by police or beat­en by plain clothed thugs dur­ing ral­lies, jour­nal­ists eas­i­ly got visas, Belaru­sian lan­guage start­ed to be used on state TV, for­eign min­istry has intro­duced visa-free trav­el for up to 5 days for 80 coun­tries, and over­all Belarus was no longer called “last dic­ta­tor­ship in Europe”. Rus­sia has sud­den­ly become a bet­ter suit­ed can­di­date for this posi­tion.

And then it all hap­pened in a mat­ter of the last cou­ple of days — oppo­si­tion activist Siarhey Palcheus­ki was sen­tenced to admin­is­tra­tive arrest, his col­league Zmitser Dashke­vich was vio­lent­ly abduct­ed by plain­clothes and is expect­ing a jail sen­tence, Natalia Pap­ko­va, orga­niz­er of a protest ral­ly in Brest, was put to a men­tal hos­pi­tal just before the ral­ly, oth­er activists were detained before or after the protest.

What was real­ly indica­tive, how­ev­er, was a 26 min­utes long “spe­cial report” on Belarus’ first nation­al TV chan­nel “A Phone Call to a Friend”  that returned all the stereo­types of the “last dic­ta­tor­ship” cold war peri­od – “oppo­si­tion is cor­rupt and fund­ed by the West”, “Maid­an is bad and means chaos”, “protest­ing in Belarus will result in a war like it hap­pened in Ukraine”, etc. A good exam­ple demon­strat­ing the over­all tone of the report: “Can Statke­vich guar­an­tee that some shell-shocked peo­ple will not bring along explo­sives to the protest ral­ly that will blow up in the mid­dle of the crowd?”

The report shows end­less footage of blood and gore, vio­lence and war from Ukraine, 26 min­utes of which would set anybody’s pan­ic switch to “over­drive”. BT stole footage from oth­er media and manip­u­lat­ed facts by means of ruth­less edit­ing. The report was lat­er broad­cast on oth­er Belaru­sian chan­nels, which shows its sig­nif­i­cance for the author­i­ties and proves it is not a piece of jour­nal­ism, but was rather made to order.

Most peo­ple who watched it were shocked and sad. Most think it is prepar­ing ground for repres­sions against oppo­si­tion lead­ers and vio­lent dis­missal of the protest ral­lies, which have been recent­ly grow­ing in num­bers with police qui­et­ly watch­ing from aside. There are at least six ral­lies planned next week, and a big one in Min­sk on March 25th, so we’ll see if the lib­er­al­iza­tion is real­ly over.