BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

15/01/2007

Poland broadcasts "truth" to Belarus

By Chris Johnson

BIALYSTOK, Poland (Reuters) - From simple back offices in a provincial Polish town, a radio station is broadcasting around the clock to Belarus, giving the ex-Soviet republic one of its few sources of independent news.

Run by opponents of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, Radio Racja (Truth) is helping wage an information war against a regime branded by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as "Europe's last dictatorship."

Supported by the Polish Foreign Ministry and Budapest-based Open Society Institute founded by U.S. billionaire investor George Soros, Radio Racja is one of only two independent stations broadcasting freely into Belarus.

The station uses Web technology to mix popular music and social commentary with uncensored news in both Belarussian and Russian, aiming to provide a platform for both opposition parties and Belarussian bands, some of which are banned at home.

"I dream of a free and independent Belarus," says editor-in- chief Wiktor Stachwiuk, a 58-year-old exile. "I want to give Belarussians a taste of a free society. Official media do not let them hear what is really going on."

Lukashenko, in power since 1994, keeps a tight rein on the eastern European country and its 10 million inhabitants, sandwiched between Poland and Russia.

He rejects all criticism of his rule and has called for vigilance to keep Belarus safe from Western "lies and violence." Opposition politicians and journalists have disappeared and all media outlets face serious restrictions.

Western countries accuse Lukashenko of systematic crackdowns on the opposition and dismiss all Belarus elections over the last decade as unfair. They say the president blatantly rigged elections last year to engineer a landslide win for himself.

"I could not simply stand by and watch what was happening in my country without doing anything," Stachwiuk said. He first set up Radio Racja in 1999 and it broadcast from the Polish capital of Warsaw until 2002.

INTIMIDATION

His Warsaw station eventually ran into financial problems and it took Stachwiuk and his associates three more years to raise enough money to launch the station in Bialystok, closer to Belarus and able to broadcast deeper into the country.

It now has a budget of $1 million a year, half of which is spent on transmitters: two in Poland and two in Lithuania.

Almost a year after its relaunch, Stachwiuk estimates Radio Racja, with a staff of just 32, has an audience of up to 400,000 mostly in western Belarus, plus tens of thousands of exiles, and says it is building up rapidly on short and medium wave and on a newly launched FM band:

"The station can be heard well on medium wave all the way to (Belarus capital) Minsk and can even be picked up in Finland."

The station has a small network of reporters, mostly working under pseudonyms, across Belarus who record programs using MP3 technology and send them via the Internet to Bialystok or to one of two covert editing stations in Belarus.

Radio Racja editors say their correspondents face daily harassment from the Belarus authorities -- mostly just petty intimidation but occasionally arrest and jail.

"Several of our people have been put in prison for a few days, one for 10 days, but nothing more serious so far," said Michal Andrysiuk, 47, head of FM broadcasting.

"One of our correspondents broadcast live from a police car after being arrested on a charge of cursing in the street. Hooliganism is the most frequent official excuse to arrest people who are obviously known to the police," he said.

"NO TRUTH IN THE NEWS"

Belarus opposition politicians and journalists welcome Radio Racja's efforts to break the state media monopoly but say its impact so far has been limited, partly because most Belarussians rely on television for news.

Zhanna Litvina, head of the Belarussian Association of Journalists, said by telephone it was a "comforting thought that such radio stations exist and that Belarussians are working for them."

"Unfortunately, you cannot say that such projects are very effective in current Belarussian conditions. To make them effective you would need transmitters in Belarus and under current conditions that is impossible."

But the radio station's backers in Poland are convinced that there is an audience and that it is growing:

"I was in Belarus some time ago and met people listening to the radio and glad of it," said Michal Dworczyk, a key advisor on eastern European issues to Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski. "The media role in the fight for democracy is indisputable. For Belarus and its people, it is essential."

And Radio Racja's staff say they are not discouraged and will keep broadcasting, even if the audience is tiny.

"We really want to show what is going on. We try to be objective, asking for comment from the government, but they won't talk to us," said program director Jana Kamienskaja, 37.

"'There is no news in the truth, and there is no truth in the news' -- unfortunately this old Soviet proverb is still valid in Belarus."

Belarus officials declined to comment on Radio Racja.

(Additional reporting by Andrei Makhovsky in Minskand Gabriela Baczynska in Warsaw)

Source:

http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2007-01-14T235824Z_01_L09867637_RTRIDST_0_LIFESTYLE-POLAND-BELARUS-RADIO-COL.XML