(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has protested the 28 June 2003 expulsion of Pavel Selin, the Minsk correspondent for the Russian television station NTV, due to an allegedly “biased” report on the funeral of a writer opposed to President Alexander Lukashenko. The Belarusian foreign ministry withdrew Selin’s accreditation, banned him from entering the country for five years […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has protested the 28 June 2003 expulsion of Pavel Selin, the Minsk correspondent for the Russian television station NTV, due to an allegedly “biased” report on the funeral of a writer opposed to President Alexander Lukashenko. The Belarusian foreign ministry withdrew Selin’s accreditation, banned him from entering the country for five years and threatened to close NTV’s Minsk bureau if the station does not broadcast an apology.
Coming after the forced temporary closure of at least five independent newspapers in recent weeks (see IFEX alerts of 26, 9 and 2 June, 30 and 27 May 2003), Selin’s expulsion and the threatened closure of the NTV bureau seem to be part of a deliberate policy to eliminate news diversity in Belarus. If the authorities do put an end to NTV coverage in Belarus, they will deprive the public of one of the few easily accessible non-governmental news sources.
RSF therefore calls on the authorities to reverse their decision and allow Selin to resume working in Belarus and, in general, not to obstruct the work of foreign journalists.
On 27 June, the foreign ministry asked Selin to explain a 25 June report on the funeral of writer Pavel Bykov, in which he said the police deliberately obstructed the 20,000-strong procession and Bykov’s widow had been stripped of her permission to reside in Minsk. The report also stressed the presence of the red and white flag that was used when Belarus won independence, but has since been banned and is now a symbol of opposition to Lukashenko’s regime.
Selin, who was told on 28 June of the Interior Ministry’s decision to expel him, said the authorities were especially annoyed that he included an interview with Stanislav Shushkevich, Belarus’s first post-independence leader, in which he said “Lukashenko was afraid to come to the funeral.”
Selin has come under pressure from the authorities in the past about his reporting in Belarus. On 25 April 2002, the foreign ministry announced that it had warned him about a series of reports on repression of the Belarusian opposition. Selin had been summoned to the ministry the previous day and asked to deny the truth of the reports and to apologise for their “biased and groundless” content.
