Minsk: Police search journo Raman Vasyukovich’s place over ‘extremist’ book

The search was car­ried out by offi­cers of Min­sk Air Trans­port Inter­nal Affairs Direc­torate; they were look­ing for ‘extrem­ist lit­er­a­ture and sym­bols’, but noth­ing ques­tion­able was found or seized.

The unex­pect­ed vis­it is appar­ent­ly linked to the inci­dent that hap­pened in Decem­ber. Then Raman Vasyukovich who had a copy of Belaru­sian Don­bas, the book by Bel­sat TV jour­nal­ists Kat­syary­na Andreye­va and Ihar Ilyash on him was detained at Min­sk Air­port; the book was tak­en away and nev­er returned. A pro­to­col was drawn upon the media work­er for ‘dis­tri­b­u­tion or trans­porta­tion of extrem­ist items’, although the book had not been not declared ‘extrem­ist’ at that moment.

On March 26, Kas­trych­nit­s­ki dis­trict of Min­sk ruled that Belaru­sian Don­bas would be con­sid­ered extrem­ist in the ter­ri­to­ry of Belarus. The work is noth­ing but a jour­nal­is­tic inves­ti­ga­tion about Belaru­sians at war, the role of spe­cial ser­vices and per­son­al­ly Alyak­san­dr Lukashen­ka, as well as how this con­flict affect­ed Belarus, the authors say.

Under the Belaru­sian law, the dis­tri­b­u­tion of ‘extrem­ist’ works is pro­hib­it­ed in the coun­try; the access to the web­sites on which they were post­ed must also be blocked. At that, the con­tent of infor­ma­tion prod­ucts includ­ed in the repub­li­can list of extrem­ist mate­ri­als is not sub­ject to announce­ment. If found dur­ing search­es, the pub­li­ca­tions deemed extrem­ist may be con­fis­cat­ed and sub­se­quent­ly destroyed.