The Belarusian government is stifling university activity and campus life in its Soviet-style attack on civil society.
A new 49-page report by Human Rights Watch details how President Aleksandr Lukashenka's government has suppressed research on controversial topics, re-centralized academic decision- making, and maintained a ban on political activity on campuses. At the same time, a systematic crackdown on political dissent on campus has targeted outspoken students and lecturers who are threatened with expulsion, often for their off-campus political activity.
"President Lukashenka is strangling intellectual life in Belarus,"said Holly Cartner, executive director of the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. "This drive for political control on campuses mirrors what he has done to the rest of civil society."
Since President Lukashenka's election in 1994, the government has hounded or disbanded opposition political parties and nongovernmental organizations, and has stripped independent lawyers of their accreditation. His regime has also harassed and arrested peaceful political activists, and has severely curtailed the independent media.
State university authorities issue reprimands and warnings to politically active lecturers, independent historians, and other academics. University employees who challenge the status quo are told to curtail political activities or change the focus of their academic enquiry.
State university administrators target research into politically sensitive issues, such as the Belarusian independence movement during the Soviet era, a theme that is seen to challenge state policy of integration with Russia and is actively dissuaded. "President Lukashenka has made his own historical interpretation a keystone of the government's integration policy," said Ms. Cartner. "Independent historians are today viewed in the same light as oppositionist politicians."
The Human Rights Watch report traces the politicization of history in Belarus. Beginning in the perestroika period, historians enjoyed a free rein to research and publish on issues that were formerly taboo.
Now, that freedom has gradually been restricted. Historians who have researched Belarus' national past or Stalinist atrocities face restrictions in their work. Historians and researchers who publish or organize conferences on such themes are attacked in polemics in the state press and refused access to the media to publish their responses.
High school and university history textbooks written and published in the post-Soviet period have gradually been removed from the classroom and replaced with standard Soviet-era editions by order of the government.
The report exposes the insidious role that the Belarusian Patriotic Union of Youth (BPSM) plays on campuses. Formed on the initiative of President Lukashenka, the BPSM is a vigorously pro- presidential youth organization that appears to be modeled on the Soviet-era Komsomol. It has representative offices in every state university and institution of higher education, and its goal is to politically indoctrinate young people and keep them from getting involved in opposition politics.
BPSM members receive privileges and discounts on campus and in stores. By contrast, students who are active in opposition politics or demonstrations face warnings, fines, imprisonment and expulsion from their place of study because of their political activity. The government funds and provides campus facilities for the BPSM, and actively promotes membership in it as necessary for students who want to get ahead. But it bans from campuses any independent organizations deemed political.
Private education has proven no easy escape from the stifling atmosphere of state universities. Local authorities employ a range of tactics, some of them ridiculous, in their persistent harassment of public lecture programs. In 1998, local authorities denied a group of lawyers in the southern Belarusian city of Pruzhany permission to hold a seminar on human rights by claiming there was an "epidemic" in the town.
In another incident that year, participants in a seminar organized by a group of young intellectuals held in a newspaper's editorial offices, were subsequently interviewed by the KGB, which was anxious to determine who the organizers were, what was said and with what funds.
Human Rights Watch called on the Belarusian government to stop its repression against politically active students and faculty, and to reinstate those who have been expelled for their political beliefs and activities, including Denis Bobikov and Anatol' Britsen formerly of the Gorky Academy of Agriculture, Evgenny Skochko, formerly of the Belarusian State Technical Univeristy, and Ales' Mukhin formerly of SISRU State Information System and Radioelectronics University. The organization also called on the international community, including the government of the Russian Federation, publicly to condemn and use its political and economic influence to bring an end to violations of academic freedom, freedom of expression, association, and assembly in Belarus.
Click here for a copy of the report.
For Further Information:
In Minsk, Malcolm Hawkes: +375 17 276 8197 (mobile telephone)
In Moscow, Sasha Petrov: +7 095 265 4448
In Brussels, Jean-Paul Marthoz:+32 2 732-2009
In London, Urmi Shah: +44 171 713-1995
In New York, Holly Cartner: +1 212 216-1277
