Last week Belarus twice became the international news maker. First time it was on Monday when over a hundred people were bashed and detained during a peaceful demonstration. Then on Thursday the local law enforcers carried out a special operation against the independent journalists. Significantly, a week before that Alexander Lukashenko met with the British PR expert Timothy Bell who used to work with Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet and Boris Berezovsky. Lukashenko announced his intention to start a large PR campaign intended for improving Belarus’ image in the West. Byelorussian journalists declared immediately the cleaning up to be the first “successful” joint project by Lukashenko and Bell.    

On the Thursday morning, tens of Byelorussian media workers were visited by KGB employees. The searches were made not only in Minsk but also in other cities of the country. In the province, the special service officers came to the journalists already with the ready witnesses, like it was with Elena Stepanova and Andrei Shobin, the journalists from the city of Vitebsk.

In all cases the special services acted in a similar way: taking away computers, dictaphones, sometimes books and magazines. It was explained that all that was done within the frames of a criminal case on the slander against the president. The case was started as far back as 2005 because of the cartoons that had appeared in the Internet.   

In those animations Alexander Lukashenko was pictured like a funny character and not like a slandered and insulted victim. Nonetheless, Andrei Obozov, the administrator of the website, and Pavel Morozov, coordinator of the project, preferred to leave Belarus after having been examined by the KGB.  

No journalists of those, whose houses were burst into on Thursday, had anything to do with those cartoons. So the case was just used by the special services. The matter is when a case is not closed then any “investigative actions” are easier to be justified.  

However, the point was that all the “blacklisted” journalists cooperated with Polish radio station “Razya”, or with a satellite Polish TV station “Belsat”, or with European Radio for Belarus. Those all are the western projects and it’s exactly them that the special services are interested to know about.   

The written commission by deputy prosecutor of Minsk Alexei Stuk, sent to the deputy chair of Byelorussian KGB Victor Vegera was featured with a postscript saying that searches must be also made at the flats of other activists from “radical politicized groups”. So the clean-up operation against journalists appears to be the beginning of a big special operation.