Three journalists from an independent Belarusian newspaper were arrested Monday after authorities raided their office, the latest move in a sweeping campaign to silence the last remaining independent voices in the country. The arrests came the same day a Minsk court handed down prison sentences of up to nine years to eleven people accused of coordinating protest activity online, with at least one defendant alleging he was tortured into confessing.
The editor of Regionalnaya Gazeta, Alyaksandr Mantsevich, along with journalists Zoya Khrutskaya and Nasta Utkina, were taken into custody following a search of the paper’s office in Maladzyechna, a city about 80 kilometres northeast of the capital Minsk. The Belarusian Association of Journalists confirmed the detentions and noted that 64 raids have taken place across the country in just the past ten days alone. At this point, 32 journalists are either behind bars awaiting trial or already serving sentences.
“The authorities have turned life into hell for independent journalists in Belarus with a conveyor belt of searches and arrests,” said Andrei Bastunets, head of the Belarusian Association of Journalists. “There is an impression that the authorities have decided to leave the country without journalists.”
Also on Monday, Belarusian authorities froze the bank accounts of the Belarusian PEN Center, an association of writers led by Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich, who left Belarus last year after being summoned for questioning by state investigators. The move signals that the crackdown is no longer limited to news organizations and is now reaching into literary and cultural institutions as well.
Among those sentenced Monday was 26-year-old Yevgeny Propolsky, who received eight years in prison. During the trial he told the court that investigators beat him and applied electric current to his body to force him to write a confession. His account was consistent with reports of abuse that human rights organizations have been documenting since protests erupted in Belarus following the disputed August 2020 presidential election.
The Viasna human rights centre counted all eleven people sentenced Monday as political prisoners and put the total number of political prisoners currently held in Belarus at 562. Viasna also confirmed that Monday’s searches extended beyond journalists to civil society activists and human rights defenders in the western cities of Brest and Pinsk.
Belarus has been in a state of deep political tension since President Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory in his sixth consecutive election, a result that opposition groups and Western governments widely rejected as fraudulent. The months of street protests that followed were met with mass arrests, with more than 35,000 people detained and thousands beaten by police. Leading opposition figures were either jailed or driven out of the country, and independent media outlets have faced continuous pressure ever since.
Canada, along with the United States, the European Union and Britain, imposed fresh sanctions on Belarus last month after Lukashenko’s government forced a commercial Ryanair flight to land in Minsk and arrested an opposition journalist and his girlfriend who were travelling on board. Lukashenko responded Monday by suggesting Belarus could help stem the flow of migrants crossing into the European Union from its territory, but only if the sanctions were lifted first. The government of neighbouring Lithuania has accused Belarus of deliberately encouraging that migrant flow as a form of retaliation.
On the same day as the arrests, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenko’s main opponent in the 2020 election who was forced to flee Belarus in the immediate aftermath of the vote. Tsikhanouskaya urged greater international pressure on the Lukashenko government, and the meeting was seen as a strong signal of continued American support for the Belarusian opposition ahead of her scheduled meetings at the White House the following day.
Original reporting by Al Jazeera.
