How Do You Tell a Story Like Belarus?, Daily Brief July 12, 2023

Belarus gets little love from the international media.

The country caused a blip on the global news radar last month for the briefest of moments, when Russian mercenary warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin abandoned his dramatic march on Moscow and head for exile in Belarus.

But that blip was rare. Most days, most months, pass without any media attention to the country known as “Europe’s last dictatorship.” When Belarus is mentioned, it’s almost always only in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as with the Prigozhin story.

I can think of only two exceptions in recent years, when international news looked at Belarus as Belarus. First was during the mass protests following the fraudulent elections in August 2020 – though media interest in the wave of brutal repression afterwards dropped off all too quickly. Second was human rights defender Ales Bialiatski winning the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

The problem from the news editor’s point of view, of course, is the biggest story in Belarus is not in any way “new.” It’s the day-to-day drudgery of its ugly regime under Aliaksandr Lukashenka, dictator of this zone of repression since the age of the dinosaurs.

OK, since 1994, actually, but nearly 30 years in power is a long time. The average age in Belarus is 39, so he’s just about the only dinosaur – sorry, president – many of the country’s 9.5 million people have ever known.

And his rule has been truly tyrannosaurian.

The crushing of free expression and media, the brutal repression of protesters, the persecution of human rights defenders, police brutality, disappearances, torture in custody and forced confessions, sham trials, the death penalty…

But none of this brutality is “news” in the way international media think of news. Indeed, most of the abuses in this list are the same horrors I heard about from Belarus journalists, when I ran a reporting workshop in Minsk 20 years ago.

It’s been a constant, decades-long horror for millions, but it’s mostly invisible in mainstream international news, even here in Europe.

And yet the stories in Belarus are jaw-dropping. One of the latest examples is the case of journalist Pavel Mazheika and lawyer Yulia Yurhilevich, currently on trial for “aiding extremist activity.”

Yurhilevich was a defense attorney well-known for representing victims of politically motivated prosecutions, until she was disbarred in February 2022.

Prosecutors are now saying the two defendants had “by prior conspiracy” shared information about Yurhilevich’s disbarment.

However, the notification of her disbarment is openly available on the website of Belarus’s Justice Ministry. So, the two defendants face up to seven years in prison for sharing information widely available to the public – that the government itself has made widely available to the public.

This kind of absurd repression is surely news the world should see and learn more about.