Belsat Director in a Public Meeting at Press Club in Minsk

“I was assured there would be no cut-downs in financ­ing from the Pol­ish side”

Bel­sat has been broad­cast­ing for nine years, and Mrs Romaszews­ka believes it to be the main suc­cess.

But the sit­u­a­tion with the “thaw” in rela­tions with Belarus, on the one hand, opens up oppor­tu­ni­ties, but on the oth­er hand, cre­ates some prob­lem­at­ic issues.

“There are now less repres­sions against jour­nal­ists. Our reporters can get to major­i­ty of places, even though they have no accred­i­ta­tion. On the oth­er hand, our spon­sors who fund us are now get­ting away from Belarus. They con­sid­er that the sit­u­a­tion is improv­ing, and Europe has many oth­er prob­lems. We’ve lost a sig­nif­i­cant part of financ­ing from West­ern Europe. Mean­while, I was assured that there would be no cut-downs from the Pol­ish side. In our ninth year of work, it would have been a waste of already invest­ed mon­ey…»

“If some­body wants to stop us here, we will keep work­ing from Poland.”

“Bel­sat is now broad­cast­ing through two chan­nels – the satel­lite chan­nel and the Inter­net. Satel­lite pro­grams are more aimed for the province, and the Inter­net is more aimed for Min­sk and large cities. We are not going to aban­don satel­lite broad­cast­ing, but now we put high­er stakes on devel­op­ing the web­site.

We pur­sue two tasks: the first one being infor­ma­tion and the sec­ond one is large pro­grams. And we are plan­ning to record more pro­grams in Min­sk. For the time being, the main work is done here, in Poland we only assem­ble it into a seam­less set. But if some­body wants to stop us here, we will keep work­ing from Poland. It is essen­tial that it is a joint Belarus-Poland project. Every­one is doing their part. I deal with shap­ing the gen­er­al line, where­as my col­leagues decide what it will look like specif­i­cal­ly…

The channel’s man­age­ment are expect­ing the Belarus For­eign Affairs’ Min­istry to respond to our request to accred­it ten of our jour­nal­ists in the ter­ri­to­ry of Belarus. The requests have been lodged since 2008, every time it was in vain. “I am prone to think that this time there will be a refusal, too. But let’s see, I will not prophet.”

“Why the author­i­ties deny accred­i­ta­tion? I don’t know the answer. It stems from the nature of these author­i­ties. I don’t see any use in it for them. But some­times they like to do so. I don’t think, though, that with accred­i­ta­tion our work will get eas­i­er. Even if we get the accred­i­ta­tion, we won’t become “Rus­sia Today.”

Has Bel­sat some­thing to do to counter Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da? 

“We are con­sid­er­ing all the time a pos­si­bil­i­ty to cre­ate Russ­ian-lan­guage pro­grams. But first, I have to get my col­leagues’ con­sent, and sec­ond, I have to find financ­ing for this. Opin­ions regard­ing the lan­guage issues has split into two oppo­sites. One side thinks that the Belaru­sian lan­guage is our trade­mark, the oth­er side believes that the Russ­ian lan­guage would allow to engage larg­er audi­ences.

I stick to the lat­ter. The ques­tion of the Russ­ian lan­guage is the ques­tion of our effec­tive­ness. Our sig­nal reach­es as far as the Urals; we could be watched even in the Crimea.  The ide­al vari­ant could be twins: one chan­nel is a nor­mal Bel­sat for Belarus, and the sec­ond chan­nel is aimed for the Russ­ian audi­ences.

Bel­sat does not fol­low a polit­i­cal line, but sticks to two prin­ci­ples. The first prin­ci­ple is that Belarus is a part of West­ern Europe and West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. The sec­ond prin­ci­ple is that Com­mu­nism is a crim­i­nal regime. These are our basic, undis­putable views of con­tem­po­rary real­i­ty.

“Free­lancers are largest con­cern”

“I am going to meet Kas­tus Zhuk­ous­ki, the Homel-based free­lancer who is now the cham­pi­on in the num­ber of fines for work with­out accred­i­ta­tion. How­ev­er, by doing this, I can only show that I am con­cerned with the issue,” she admits. “Free­lancers are our largest con­cern. What should we do when the author­i­ties chose to pres­sur­ize indi­vid­ual jour­nal­ists?

One of the first ques­tions from our col­leagues who came to be employed by Bel­sat was: “Can you guar­an­tee our safe­ty?” And I answered no, I could not, unfor­tu­nate­ly. This is your respon­si­bil­i­ty, if you want to take the risk or not.

I know that BAJ helps, and we are very grate­ful. It would have been very dif­fi­cult with­out it. We have no any spe­cif­ic ideas how to solve the issue. We can always say: when you’ve had enough of it, come to Poland, take a lit­tle break. But it is very hard to change the sit­u­a­tion. We can only promise that we won’t leave the per­son alone. Even if BAJ does not help, we won’t for­get about these peo­ple.”