BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

24/02/2006

Broadcasts from Poland try to break Belarus news monopoly

By Judy Dempsey International Herald Tribune

BERLIN A radio station set up by Poland's new conservative government began broadcasting news into neighboring Belarus this week in what Warsaw describes as a strategy to help the country move toward democracy.

Radio Racja, or Radio Reason, opened its offices in Bialystok in northeastern Poland on Wednesday with the explicit aim of weakening the state monopoly over information in Belarus just four weeks before presidential elections there.

Opposition activists, diplomats and human rights organizations say President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, who has been in power since 1994 and is seeking a third consecutive term, has done his utmost to hamper the opposition's campaign for the March 19 vote, notably restricting media access.

"We hope Radio Racja will make a difference, however small," said Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a former Polish defense minister and now vice president of the European Parliament. "The aim is to try and break the state control over news and information," added Onyszkiewicz, a former activist in the Solidarity movement.

The radio was originally set up in 1999 to broadcast to the Belarussian minority in Poland.

It was forced to close in 2002 when the former communist government in Warsaw, which was defeated in October by the Party for Law and Justice, halted funding.

Jan Curylovic, who represents the opposition Belarussian Popular Front in Brussels, said Law and Justice had lived up to its election promises.

"It said it would reopen the radio station, and it did," he said. "It seems this new government is extremely concerned about what will happen to its eastern neighbors."

Radio Racja, which is also being transmitted from Lithuania, joins two long-established foreign stations that broadcast in Belarussian: Radio Polonia, Poland's international station; and the U.S. backed Radio Free Europe.

But several newcomers have also begun to feed news into Belarus, a country of nearly 10 million people, to provide views different from those aired by state-controlled broadcasters. Germany's state-owned international Deutsche Welle station started transmitting a few weeks ago, and an international consortium led by German, Polish and Lithuanian broadcasters and funded by the European Union started transmitting in Belarussian and Russian last month.

The Belarus opposition, led by

Aleksandr Milinkevich, the main candidate running against Lukashenko, has received practical support from Poland's new government and most of the opposition parties.

In recent weeks, Milinkevich, a scientist, has been chaperoned through the major capitals of Europe by Polish legislators to explain the difficulties he is facing in running for office in one of the last bastions of communism in the former Soviet Union.

This comes at a time when the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and his twin brother Jaroslav, who leads Law and Justice, have started to take a hard look at Warsaw's policies toward the eastern neighbors of Poland and the European Union.

Pawel Dobrowolski, former ambassador to Canada and now spokesman for the Polish Foreign Ministry, said one of the first decisions the government made when it took office in November was to change the ministry's European department.

"In the mid-1990s, the European department was focused almost entirely on joining the European Union and NATO," he said. "Now that Poland is in both, we have begun to reorganize the European department by establishing an eastern department to focus more closely on our Eastern neighbors. It could be described as a realignment of our policies with regard to Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus."

In practical terms, Polish officials said this means allocating more money to embassies and consulates in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, as well as to Radio Racja, which was given a start-up budget of ?270,000, or $320,000, this week.

Dobrowolski said the shift in Poland's priorities also showed that the government believed it had a special responsibility in the region.

"The EU's eastern policy falls on Poland's shoulders," he said. "We see it as a duty to provide the EU with a clear view of what is taking place on its new eastern borders."

Polish diplomats and legislators in the European Parliament acknowledge that President Vladimir Putin of Russia is not pleased with Warsaw's raising the profile of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia on the EU level.

Putin openly criticized the former president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, for mediating during Ukraine's Orange Revolution in December 2004.

It was one of the earliest instances in which Kwasniewski, a former communist, took such a stand.

"Russia will not forget this," Dobrowolski said.

Source:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/23/news/radio.php