Belarus Opposition Leader Gets a Five-Year Sentence

Andrei Sannikov, a former deputy foreign minister, is the highest-profile politician to be sentenced in a series of trials that has been purging the leadership of the beleaguered opposition in the former Soviet republic.

The courtroom erupted in shouts of “Shame!” and “Freedom!” from Mr. Sannikov’s supporters when the judge read the verdict, according to Radio Liberty.

The demonstration was called to protest the victory of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko in a presidential election last December, after independent observers documented large-scale fraud. Mr. Sannikov, 57, was a candidate in that election.

Tens of thousands of people gathered in the capital, Minsk, for the protest, which international observers and independent journalists said was largely peaceful until helmeted riot police officers wielding clubs and shields dispersed it. The government, however, accused Mr. Sannikov and other opposition leaders of fueling mass unrest that led to the breaking down of doors of a government building in Minsk.

The resulting crackdown, observers say, has been the most severe of Mr. Lukashenko’s nearly 17-year rule. Seven of the nine opposition candidates were among the hundreds arrested after the protest, and over two dozen opposition figures have been convicted and sentenced to up to four years in prison.

Mr. Sannikov has spent the last five months in a cell at the prison of the K.G.B. in Minsk.

In testimony, Mr. Sannikov accused prison guards of torturing him and other opposition figures, depriving them of sleep, exposing them to severe cold and threatening family members in an effort to secure confessions.

Mr. Sannikov accused the head of the K.G.B., Vadim Zaitsev, of threatening to harm his wife and young son if he did not agree to give incriminating testimony.

“When I refused to affirm this lie that was offered to me, when I refused to write a petition, Zaitsev literally said the following: ‘Then harsh measures will be taken against your wife and child,’?” Mr. Sannikov said, according to a transcript of his testimony published to the opposition Web site, Charter 97.

Mr. Sannikov was arrested along with his wife, Irina Khalip, a journalist, after the December protest. Both said they were beaten. After their arrest, the authorities threatened to take custody of their son, Danil, but eventually allowed Ms. Khalip’s parents to care for the boy, who will turn 4 on Sunday. Ms. Khalip was later released from prison under house arrest, and is now on trial.

Mr. Lukashenko and his government have portrayed Mr. Sannikov and the opposition as traitors who tried to orchestrate a coup with the backing of Western governments.

In recent months, the president has blamed the opposition and its Western backers for the country’s increasingly dire economic situation, although most opposition members are in jail, in exile or in hiding. Mr. Lukashenko has also said the opposition was linked to the terrorist bombing at a Minsk subway station last month that killed 14 people.

Anton Zagorovsky, the prosecutor in Mr. Sannikov’s trial, had requested that the opposition leader be sentenced to seven years in prison.

“From November to December 20, Sannikov and others organized mass unrest, accompanied by pogroms, preparations for arson, the destruction of property, violence against people and armed resistance against representatives of the government,” Mr. Zagorovsky said in closing remarks on Friday, the Interfax news agency reported.

Independent observers have challenged this version of events, which has nevertheless been zealously repeated by officials and the government-controlled media. The United States and European Union have imposed sanctions against Belarussian officials as punishment for the crackdown and have demanded the release of Mr. Sannikov and other opposition members.

Even Belarus’s once stalwart ally Russia has criticized the government for its handling of the protest.

Representatives from the United States and the European Union were present at Mr. Sannikov’s sentencing on Saturday.

The United States and the European bloc condemned the verdict. A State Department spokesman called the decision “clearly politically motivated.”

“Belarus should immediately and unconditionally release all political prisoners and cease continuing human rights violations against critics of the government, who remain at risk of harassment and arbitrary arrest,” the spokesman, Mark Toner, said.

Mr. Sannikov’s lawyers called the 10-day trial against him a farce. Witnesses provided no evidence that Mr. Sannikov or others had engaged in violence as the prosecutor contended, the lawyers said.

Four other opposition activists on trial with Mr. Sannikov were also convicted and sentenced on Saturday to between 3 and 3 ? years in prison.

Speaking to Radio Liberty after the verdict, Mr. Sannikov’s mother, Alla, said she was proud of her son.

 

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.”