From Poland, Satellite TV Tries to Pierce the Belarus Media Muzzle

But if you want to see Belsat’s nerve center, you have to head to neighboring Poland, to a cramped office in downtown Warsaw.

There, for 17 hours a day, a team of nearly three dozen Poles and Belarussians broadcast into a country whose media are tightly controlled by the government of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.

Recent crackdowns in Belarus stemming from demonstrations against Mr. Lukashenko’s grip on power have created even more hurdles for journalists.

Belsat’s operation here has sought to help overcome that, using 120 freelancers inside Belarus who each day send news to Warsaw by phone or the Internet. Many of them have been detained, arrested or fined.

“They are not allowed to work as journalists,” said Alaksei Dzikavitski, Belsat TV’s editorial director for news. “The authorities refuse to accredit them because they work for Belsat TV.”

For Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy, the founder and director of Belsat TV, which made its first broadcast in December 2007, it is natural that her operation would find a home in Poland. As the daughter of leading Polish dissidents in the Communist era, she said she believed that Poles had something to give to their neighbors seeking freedom.

“We struggled for that freedom, but you do not get it if you do not do something to make it happen,” said Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy, 48, a former historian.

Her father, Zbigniew Romaszewski, was one of the founders in 1976 of KOR, the independent labor self-defense committee. He later founded the Helsinki Committee in Poland, a human rights movement. In the early 1980s he was a leading member of Solidarity, the trade union movement.

During martial law, which was imposed in 1981, Mr. Romaszewski was jailed for two years and his wife, Zofia, for a year. Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy herself was in jail for six months, and her husband, Jaroslaw Guzy, then a student leader, was imprisoned for a year.

“I suppose we are a criminal family,” Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy said.

These days, the Polish government is one of the most active supporters of the democratic opposition in Belarus. And Poland’s Foreign Ministry provides an annual stipend to Belsat TV of nearly $6 million, the bulk of its annual budget of about $9 million. The Swedish government is providing a grant of about $3 million over a three-year period that ends in 2013.

That support led at least in part to accusations by Mr. Lukashenko’s government last month that Poland was trying to destabilize Belarus. Poland denies that claim. Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy said that the role played by Western radio stations like Radio Free Europe, France International and the BBC in providing independent news to Poles during the Communist era gave Poles an alternative view of the news. Now, she says, Belarussians should have that opportunity, too.

“It’s about giving something back — in this case providing independent news to Belarus,” she said. “After all, the underground opposition in Poland during the 1970s and later under martial law depended so much on news from international broadcasting stations.”

“I suppose what we are doing inside Belarus is a kind of modern samizdat,” said Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy, referring to how information under the former Communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was disseminated on smudgy carbon-copied pages.

So when freelancers from Belarus offer to work for Belsat TV, Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy plays down the glamour of such a job and plays up the risks.

“Our contributors know what they are letting themselves in for,” she said. “I tell them that it is their choice, their fate, their own responsibility. I tell them that I cannot guarantee their security. It is Lukashenko who is responsible.”

At Belsat’s makeshift studios, which are inside the headquarters of Polish Television, Mr. Dzikavitski says that apart from the challenges inside Belarus, the channel needs cameras and transmission equipment, in addition to money for programming and training.

But despite the budget restraints and the conditions in which Belsat’s journalists work — they cannot attend official events or seek information from the authorities — it broadcasts the news every day.

Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy said the continued actions of the Belarus security forces, which have cracked down on the opposition leaders as well as teachers, lawyers and journalists, underscored the need for timely news delivered to Belarussians.

“The repression, instead of stopping us, forced us to change strategy,” she said. “We decided to try and respond in real time to what was happening in Belarus.”

Belsat TV is now watched by nearly 761,000 people, or about 10 percent of the population, according to the Polish Zerkalo-Info Research Center.

“People want the truth,” Ms. Romaszewska-Guzy said. “It is what we wanted when we lived under Communism.”