There has rightly been international condemnation of the arrest of Roman Protasevich after his Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania was diverted to Belarusian capital Minsk. It is of particular concern that the state hijacking of Flight FR4978 was carried out on the personal orders of President Alexander Lukashenko. His disgraceful “confession” on state TV comes straight from the authoritarian playbook.
The 26-year-old has been described in a single report on the BBC as a “Belarusian opposition journalist”, a “dissident” and an “activist”. This extraordinary young man is all these things and more. But it is important that the western media does not let the Belarus regime define the narrative.
Protasevich is an independent journalist, but to be so in Belarus is to immediately become an activist. And, meanwhile, the regime is in the process of defining all activists as terrorists. Index has been reporting for months on the systematic crackdown on independent journalism by the Lukashenko regime. Hijacking is just the latest method to control free expression in Belarus.
British MP Tom Tugendhat (chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee) has described the arrest as a “warlike act”, and this is no understatement. He has emphasised that a hijacking is an escalation of the situation. But we should not lose sight of why Protasevich represented such a threat. It is because he was a journalist the regime has not been able to control since he fled the country for Poland in 2019.
Protasevich is the former editor of Nexta, a media organisation that works via the social media platfrom Telegram, which circumvents censorship in Belarus. Nexta was instrumental in reporting on the opposition to Lukashenko during the elections of 2020. Until this week Protasevich had been working for another Telegram channel Belamova. Like the underground “samizdat” publications of the Soviet era, these Telegram channels provided much-needed hope to civil society in Belarus.
Parallels have been drawn between Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and Roman Protasevich and it is true that he provides a similar focus for the Belarusian opposition. However, he has been targeted not as a political leader, but as a journalist. It is as a journalist that we should defend him.
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“They say that a hunger strike is declared out of despair, and yes, it’s hard not to agree with that,” Yulia Tsvetkova, a Russian feminist and LGBTQ+ activist and artist, wrote on social media on 1 May as she announced that she would start a hunger strike. “Why a hunger strike? As a person accused of a ‘serious’ crime, I have almost no rights. There is no freedom. No voice. No ability to stand up for myself and my beliefs in the outside world.”
Tsvetkova, who won Index on Censorship’s 2020 Freedom of Expression Award in the arts category, was charged with criminal distribution of pornography in June 2020 for having published body-positive drawings on a social media group she had called the “Vagina Monologues”. She is facing up to six years in prison. While the trial is ongoing, she is forced to remain in her home city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur in Russia’s Far East.
“I’ve recently realised that I can no longer sit still and watch the shame of what’s going on in this country and how my life is being derailed. And when I think about it, what other options do I have for non-violent protest?” she wrote in what was her first social media post in eight months. She also used the opportunity to call on the authorities to stop subjecting her to the protracted judicial harassment. “I just ask you not to waste any more of my time on a farce called ‘Russian justice’”.
Shortly thereafter, photos from the search of her apartment, which had taken place in 2019, were posted online and were being circulated on homophobic public forums. “I don’t know how they got on the web,” Tsvetkova’s lawyer Aleksandr Pikhovkin told Index on Censorship via email, “but we should understand that these [photos] were taken by the criminal investigation department and are under a special procedure of admittance and only for a [small] number of officers. Anyway, disclosure of these materials was made to demoralise Yulia. I think she perceived it like a kind of psychological pressure. And yes, as I realise, she felt herself harassed, suffered and disgusted.”
At the same time, a state channel ended up with Tsvetkova’s personal documents, correspondence, and tickets from her work trips. According to a social media post from Yulia on 6 May, the same channel broadcast an “expert” alleging that Tsvetkova’s work is “aimed purely at molesting minors” and that her drawings “have the same impact as the actions of paedophiles.” “Whether or not [these events] are related to my statement [on 1 May on social media] is probably up to everyone to decide for themselves,” Yulia said in the post.
“Were these abhorrent actions part of a coordinated effort to intimidate and punish Yulia for criticising the authorities? It certainly seems likely,” Index on Censorship’s CEO Ruth Smeeth said. “Yulia has done nothing more than express her very justifiable frustration with this ongoing judicial harassment. We continue to be appalled at Yulia’s treatment and stand in full solidarity with her. We call – yet again – on the Russian authorities to immediately and unconditionally drop all charges against her.”
On 7 May, Yulia announced that she was ending her hunger strike. “I reach a dead end, realising that those on the other side have no honour,” Yulia posted. “If the strategy has proved to be unworkable, it needs to be changed. I am stopping the hunger strike for now, because it is the right thing to do (just as it was the right thing to start it). And I’m looking for a new strategy.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116753″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and Putin critic, is using Instagram to send messages from the penal colony where he is being held to the outside world about his ill-treatment.
Navalny has been in the colony since February, as a direct result of his poisoning with Novichok nerve agent last summer.
The vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s leadership collapsed on a flight in August and was taken to Omsk where he was treated before being airlifted to Berlin. The doctors there concluded that he had been poisoned with the nerve agent, with the FSB in the frame for doing so, which they deny. [In a bizarre twist, one of the doctors at the Omsk hospital recently disappeared and was found two days ago wandering around a forest.]
He spent a month in Berlin in recovery before returning to Russia, despite threats that he would be detained.
On his return, he was arrested and put on trial for charges relating to an embezzlement case dating from 2014 for violating parole conditions associated with that case. Index and others believe that the charges are politically motivated and are designed to stop Navalny from contesting elections. Navalny’s argument was that he could not register twice per month as agreed in those conditions because he was in hospital.
Despite his arguments, Navalny was sentenced to almost three years in a penal colony in Vladimir Oblast, east of Moscow.
His Instagram feed – updated by his supports and family – reveals that he has been denied medical care, been tortured with sleep deprivation and is being held in unsanitary conditions with many fellow inmates suffering from tuberculosis.
On 31 March, Navalny announced he was going on hunger strike to protest that he was not receiving adequate medical treatment for acute pain in his back and a loss of feeling in his legs and was being deprived of sleep.
“I have the right to call a doctor and get medicine. They don’t give me either one or the other, “ he said.
“Instead of medical assistance, I am tortured with sleep deprivation (they wake me up eight times a night),” he wrote in one post.
A week later he revealed that there was a high incidence of tuberculosis in the colony, with three out of fifteen in his “detachment” with symptoms.
“Inside there are unsanitary conditions, tuberculosis, a lack of drugs. Looking at the nightmare plates on which they put gruel, I’m generally surprised that there is no Ebola virus here,” he wrote.
On the 13th day of his hunger strike, he complained that the books he had brought with him had been confiscated and that books that he had requested had not been provided.
Navalny had requested a copy of the Koran in order to better understand Islam.
He wrote, “I came here a month ago and brought a bunch of books. And ordered a bunch of books. But so far I have not been given a single one. Because all of them ‘must be checked for extremism’. It takes three months.”
He has now filed a lawsuit against the colony for their failure to provide them.
“Here books are our everything, and if you have to sue for the right to read, I will sue,” he wrote.
“This morning, a woman colonel stood over me and said: your blood test indicates a serious deterioration in health and risk. If you do not give up on your hunger strike, then we are ready to move on to force feeding now. And then she described the delights of force-feeding to me: straitjacket and other joys,” he wrote.
By 20 April, Navalny called himself a “walking skeleton” but revealed that the messages of support from Russia and around the world were sustaining him.
On 23 April, he wrote, “As Alice from Wonderland said: ‘Here you have to run to stay put. And to get somewhere, you have to run twice as fast.’…I ran, tried, fell, went on a hunger strike, but all the same, without your help, I just broke my forehead.”
Navalny says that the attention focused on him has meant that he finally started receiving some medical treatment.
“Two months ago, they smirked at my requests for medical assistance, they did not give any medicines and did not allow them to be transferred. A month ago, they laughed in my face at phrases like: ‘Can I find out my diagnosis?’ and ‘Can I see my own medical record?’” he wrote.
He has now been examined twice by a council of civilian doctors and has now abandoned his hunger strike.
“It will take 24 days and they say it is even harder [than the hunger strike itself]. Wish me luck.”
On 27 April, he looked back on the previous 12 months, calling it “the year of doctors and nurses and physicians in general”.
“I have never talked so much with them in my life,” he said. “First, the doctors saved me, who was dying from chemical poisoning on the plane.”
He added, “Then they rescued me a second time, risking their careers, explaining to my wife and everyone that I should be immediately taken away from the Omsk hospital, where their evil colleagues will kill me (they will not just treat me) on the orders of the Kremlin.”
“Then the Charité doctors [in Berlin] turned me from a vegetable back into a human being.”
Navalny said in his Instagram message that some doctors had fought a desperate campaign to get him normal treatment.
“Thanks to my prison doctors. I understand that they are just working within the framework that was given to them by their superiors, and therefore by the Kremlin. I can see now that people are sincerely trying to help. Yesterday, the nurse made a mark on my wrist with a pen, so as not to forget the hour when I had to give the next three tablespoons of oatmeal.”
He added, “You know, even through what I had been through all these months: I want one of my children to be a doctor. Although the children are probably not already. Well, let one of the grandchildren then.”
On 2 May, the day that the Russian Orthodox church celebrates Easter, the following message was posted on Instagram.
“How long I have been waiting for this Easter? Lent this year turned out to be difficult for me. Unfortunately, I will not be able to share a fully-fledged Easter meal today: I am still in the first half of my fascinating transformation from a skeleton barely dragging its feet into just a hungry man. But I will eat a few spoons of porridge allowed for me with an excellent Easter mood. Indeed, on such a day, I know and remember for sure that everything will be fine.”
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Index on Censorship has expressed concern over four student journalists charged with allegedly inciting minors to take part in criminal activity.
Armen Aramyan, Alla Gutnikova, Vladimir Metelkin, and Natalia Tyshkevich, journalists at online magazine Doxa – an independent student magazine about the realities of modern university life – were arrested on 14 April. The arrest of the students – from the Higher School of Economics and Moscow State University of Civil Engineering – came after they reported on protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and publishing a video in which they argue that the expulsion of students from university for participating in actions in support of Navalny is illegal.
The video, published by Doxa on 22 January, prompted the Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor to order its removal, a decision which Doxa subsequently challenged.
Roskomnadzor claimed the video was “persuading or otherwise involving minors in committing illegal actions that pose a threat to their life and health.”
The charges against the four are under 151.2 of the Russian criminal code, which carries a sentence of up to three years in prison for “involving a minor in committing acts that pose a danger to the life of a minor”.
Doxa’s offices were searched along with the homes of each of the four on trial, with their equipment seized.
The journalists are now under heavy pre-trial restrictions, which prevents them from leaving their homes, using the internet, or speaking to anyone except their close relatives and lawyers.
Since the arrests, more than 270 academics around the world have expressed their support for the four in an open letter, calling the charges “preposterous”.
Doxa said in a statement that the targeting of the student journalists is indicative of Russian authorities’ clamping down on free thought within universities.
They said: “In early 2021, we learned about the unprecedented pressure on students in Russian educational institutions. Schoolchildren, their parents, college and university students were threatened with possible problems, legal prosecution and expulsion due to participation in actions in support of Alexei Navalny, who was detained upon arrival in Russia.”
Protests in support of Navalny began in January, with over 5,000 people estimated to have been arrested across the country at the time amid some of the largest protests seen in opposition to President Vladimir Putin. In response, Russian authorities have since attempted to crack down on journalism and protests.
Index CEO Ruth Smeeth defended the rights of the Doxa four and described student journalism as “a building block of media freedom”.
“Repressive regimes silence opposition when they are scared of their populations and when they fear losing power. The Kremlin’s behaviour towards student journalists shows how fearful, yet again, they have become of their own people,” she said.
“Student journalism is a building block of media freedom, it educates and informs as well as ensuring the lifeblood that feeds the next generation of journalists. We are horrified at the targeting of the Doxa magazine and their student editors and we stand united in solidarity with them.”
Director of Global Youth & News Media, an organisation that aims to amplify youth journalism, Dr Aralynn Abare McMane said: “It shows just how desperate the Russian authorities are becoming that they persecute these student journalists, and we are gratified to see that the international press freedom community is taking this case very, very seriously.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also want to read” category_id=”8996″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
