(HRW/IFEX) – The following is a Human Rights Watch statement: (Minsk, July 15, 1999) – The Belarusian government is stifling university activity and campus life in its Soviet-style attack on civil society, Human Rights Watch charged today. A new 49-page report by Human Rights Watch details how President Aleksandr Lukashenka’s government has suppressed research on […]
(HRW/IFEX) – The following is a Human Rights Watch statement:
(Minsk, July 15, 1999) – The Belarusian government is stifling university
activity and campus life in its Soviet-style attack on civil society, Human
Rights Watch charged today.
A new 49-page report by Human Rights Watch details how President Aleksandr
Lukashenka’s government has suppressed research on controversial topics,
re-centralized academic decision- making, and maintained a ban on political
activity on campuses. At the same time, a systematic crackdown on political
dissent on campus has targeted outspoken students and lecturers who are
threatened with expulsion, often for their off-campus political activity.
“President Lukashenka is strangling intellectual life in Belarus,” said
Holly Cartner, executive director of the Europe and Central Asia Division of
Human Rights Watch. “This drive for political control on campuses mirrors
what he has done to the rest of civil society.”
Since President Lukashenka’s election in 1994, the government has hounded or
disbanded opposition political parties and nongovernmental organizations,
and has stripped independent lawyers of their accreditation. His regime has
also harassed and arrested peaceful political activists, and has severely
curtailed the independent media.
State university authorities issue reprimands and warnings to politically
active lecturers, independent historians, and other academics. University
employees who challenge the status quo are told to curtail political
activities or change the focus of their academic enquiry.
State university administrators target research into politically sensitive
issues, such as the Belarusian independence movement during the Soviet era,
a theme that is seen to challenge state policy of integration with Russia
and is actively dissuaded. “President Lukashenka has made his own historical
interpretation a keystone of the government’s integration policy,” said Ms.
Cartner. “Independent historians are today viewed in the same light as
oppositionist politicians.”
The Human Rights Watch report traces the politicization of history in
Belarus. Beginning in the perestroika period, historians enjoyed a free rein
to research and publish on issues that were formerly taboo. Now, that
freedom has gradually been restricted. Historians who have researched
Belarus’ national past or Stalinist atrocities face restrictions in their
work. Historians and researchers who publish or organize conferences on such
themes are attacked in polemics in the state press and refused access to the
media to publish their responses.
High school and university history textbooks written and published in the
post-Soviet period have gradually been removed from the classroom and
replaced with standard Soviet-era editions by order of the government.
The report exposes the insidious role that the Belarusian Patriotic Union of
Youth (BPSM) plays on campuses. Formed on the initiative of President
Lukashenka, the BPSM is a vigorously pro-presidential youth organization
that appears to be modeled on the Soviet-era Komsomol. It has representative
offices in every state university and institution of higher education, and
its goal is to politically indoctrinate young people and keep them from
getting involved in opposition politics.
BPSM members receive privileges and discounts on campus and in stores. By
contrast, students who are active in opposition politics or demonstrations
face warnings, fines, imprisonment and expulsion from their place of study
because of their political activity. The government funds and provides
campus facilities for the BPSM, and actively promotes membership in it as
necessary for students who want to get ahead. But it bans from campuses any
independent organizations deemed political.
Private education has proven no easy escape from the stifling atmosphere of
state universities. Local authorities employ a range of tactics, some of
them ridiculous, in their persistent harassment of public lecture programs.
In 1998, local authorities denied a group of lawyers in the southern
Belarusian city of Pruzhany permission to hold a seminar on human rights by
claiming there was an “epidemic” in the town. In another incident that year,
participants in a seminar organized by a group of young intellectuals held
in a newspaper’s editorial offices, were subsequently interviewed by the
KGB, which was anxious to determine who the organizers were, what was said
and with what funds.
Human Rights Watch called on the Belarusian government to stop its
repression against politically active students and faculty, and to reinstate
those who have been expelled for their political beliefs and activities,
including Denis Bobikov and Anatol’ Britsen formerly of the Gorky Academy of
Agriculture, Evgenny Skochko, formerly of the Belarusian State Technical
Univeristy, and Ales’ Mukhin formerly of SISRU State Information System and
Radioelectronics University. The organization also called on the
international community, including the government of the Russian Federation,
publicly to condemn and use its political and economic influence to bring an
end to violations of
academic freedom, freedom of expression, association, and assembly in
Belarus.
