Independent Paper Seized in Searches at Oppositional Office in Babruysk

Three police­men appeared at the office of pro-democ­ra­cy activists in Babruysk, the infor­ma­tion giv­en by BCHD activist in the Mahilou region Taisiya Kabanchuk. She wrote that the offi­cers behaved improp­er­ly, start­ed con­duct­ing search­es with­out pre­sent­ing their IDs and war­rants for search­es. The activists called the police, but the duty offi­cer said that it were their seniors, and they were doing every­thing right.

For over an hour, the police offi­cers were search­ing every­thing and every­where, look­ing through papers and pho­tograph­ing. In the end, they drew up a report, took the book­lets of the Belaru­sian Chris­t­ian Democ­ra­cy Par­ty and 155 copies of the issue of Novy Chas which pub­lished an arti­cle about 100 anniver­sary of the Belaru­sian Chris­t­ian democ­ra­cy (dat­ed Jan­u­ary 20, 2017).

It should be men­tioned that Novy Chas is a Belaru­sian-lan­guage socio-polit­i­cal week­ly which has been dis­trib­uted out­side the out­side the Bel­sayuz­druk net­work since 2006.

At the recent behind-the-door talk of Iosif Siaredzich, the edi­tor of the inde­pen­dent news­pa­per Nar­o­d­naya Volya, with Ali­ak­san­dr Lukashen­ka, the for­mer raised the issue of dis­crim­i­na­to­ry atti­tude of the state monop­o­list against some inde­pen­dent press, and the lat­ter promised to solve the issue.

There is cur­rent­ly anoth­er cam­paign for giv­ing the inde­pen­dent press equal grounds for dis­tri­b­u­tion in kiosks of Bel­sayuz­druk.