14 Jul 23 | China, Netherlands, News and features
One day last October, journalist and former China correspondent with the Dutch daily newspaper de Volkskrant Marije Vlaskamp received an odd email. It contained confirmation of a hotel reservation at the Holiday Inn Express in The Hague made on Booking.com in her name.
Two things struck her as extremely strange. One is that the reservation had been made on the Chinese language version of the website; the second is that she had never made the booking.
After calling the hotel to cancel the reservation, things became even more unsettling.
She received a message from the Chinese dissident Wang Jingyu, whom she had interviewed before. Wang had recently found refuge in the Netherlands and she had been in touch with him for a story about the ‘long arm of China’. He told Vlaskamp that a room had been booked in his name in the same hotel. Wang had also received an anonymous threat in Chinese: “‘One tip-off from me and the police will come and arrest you and your journalist friend.”
This was the moment Vlaskamp thought it was about time to inform her superiors at the paper – but not before she made herself a pot of jasmine tea. After having worked in China as a correspondent between 2001 and 2019, she knew the intimidation tactics of the Chinese state very well. She just never expected to be confronted with them after her return to the Netherlands.
Vlaskamp told the story in a long-form article in de Volkskrant in early April.
In it she revealed that the hotel reservation was just the first step in a campaign of intimidation targeted at both her and Wang.
Vlaskamp says as part of the campaign that she had received an anonymous warning that her name would be linked with bomb threats. A day later, she saw on the news that the residence of Dutch prime-minister Mark Rutte had been cordoned off and police, fire brigades and the bomb disposal unit were on the scene. Her heart “skipped a beat” when she heard that the threat was a car with a foreign number plate parked in the street where the Chinese embassy is located, just 200 meters away from the PM’s residence. That’s when she knew that the messages were part of a serious threat against her.
What is unclear is who is sending these intimidating messages. Putting pieces of the puzzle together, there is no doubt that they were acting on behalf of the Chinese state. In her article, Vlaskamp writes about researchers and scientists who have been warning for some time that China has been working on a network of influencing, subversion and intimidation abroad, while digital traces lead Dutch police investigators to IP-addresses in China and Hong Kong. But the Chinese state couldn’t be caught red-handed.
Vlaskamp is one of the first journalists to be subject to an intimidation campaign by China outside Chinese borders. In the summer 2023 issue of Index on Censorship magazine, we wrote about the case of Australian journalist Vicky Xiuzhong Xu. She and her family were harassed after contributing to a 2020 report on human rights violations in Xinjiang.
The frightening events Vlaskamp experienced illustrate perfectly just how far China is willing to go to protect its interests and silence dissidents and journalists.
But would it be wise to publish? No one could predict what effect a publication would have, and whether it would bring more risks for Vlaskamp. Both her and Wang had been threatened anonymously and told to stop their interviews and not to re-publish previous articles about Wang. They both refused to comply.
Eventually, the decision to publish was made but only after six months of soul-searching and journalistic research.
The paper explained at the time: “We only wanted to publish this story if our reporter was fully behind it. Which she is. As she writes herself, the journalistic duty to reveal wrongs takes precedence here. Besides, it is by no means certain that the intimidations would stop if she would not write about this. If her assailants believe that these intimidating practices are effective, only more of the same would be in store for her later on. And not just for Marije Vlaskamp. We are worried about a chilling effect: if de Volkskrant allows itself to be muzzled by persons claiming to act on behalf of a foreign power, this essentially affects all journalists who write critically about autocratic regimes.”
In a strongly-worded comment piece two days after the publication, de Volkskrant put the intimidation campaign against Vlaskamp and dissident Wang in a broader perspective. Not just the perspective of press freedom, which was clearly in jeopardy here, but also that of autocrats like China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who increase pressure on those who refuse to surrender to the autocrat’s personal version of reality. Within their own borders, their methods are harsh, and abroad they resort to increasingly shameless psychological warfare, the paper wrote.
Thomas Bruning, secretary general of the Dutch Association of Journalists, said that the events underscore the importance of not underestimating the use of spyware and other forms of digital surveillance. He said: “Vlaskamp’s case makes clear that journalists who critically follow regimes like China’s are vulnerable and deserve protection. More generally, journalists should be aware that digital intimidation and threats are an issue against they will have to arm themselves pro-actively.”
A search in the archives of de Volkskrant shows that the piece of early April is the last one Vlaskamp wrote about China. The paper has had a new China correspondent since 2019 but Vlaskamp had continued to write pieces for which her extensive knowledge of the country gave her analysis extra depth. Since April, she has written about Pakistan, India, Japan, North and South Korea, but not about China.
It begs the question of whether this is to protect her. Both Vlaskamp and de Volkskrant have refused to say.
[Both Vlaskamp and de Volkskrant were contacted to contribute to this story but would not comment further.]
12 Jul 23 | News and features, United Kingdom, Volume 52.02 Summer 2023, Volume 52.02 Summer 2023 Extras
In a West London art gallery, a pock-marked relief sculpture provides a devastating visual representation of a wartime Nazi atrocity. The piece is both a work of art and evidence from a crime scene: a cast of a wall riddled with bullet holes. The cast could have been taken from any number of sites across Nazi-occupied Europe. But this wall is on Alderney – one of the Channel Islands and part of the British Isles – which surrendered to the German army in 1940.
The artist Piers Secunda, who created the work, has been told by forensics experts that it was used by a German firing squad. Secunda is part of a growing group of campaigners, journalists, researchers and politicians who believe the full story of the occupation of Alderney has never been told. In particular, he believes the fate of Jewish prisoners on the island has been conveniently minimised to protect the idea of British exceptionalism. If he is right, we will have to reassess our understanding of the history of the geographical boundaries of Hitler’s Final Solution. Hence the exhibition’s title: The Holocaust on British Soil.
Just eight Jews are officially recorded as dying on Alderney. Secunda, who describes himself as a researcher as well as an artist, is sceptical. Another of his works includes reproductions of lists of deportees compiled by the French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld. Secunda is now writing to the families of 400 French Jews who are known to havebeen transported to the island from the notorious transit camp at Drancy in the suburbs of Paris.
“If many hundreds of Jews were sent to Alderney and we know the death rate of prisoners was high-between 30% and 40% – how is it possible that only eight people died on the island? There is a disconnect, and my interest is to join the dots,” he told Index.
An inconvenient truth
While Alderney is technically a Crown Dependency and not a part of the United Kingdom, the British government was responsible for the surrender of the Channel Islands. The occupation of these islands has always been an inconvenient truth. By the summer of 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet concluded the islands could not be defended, and at the beginning of July, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney were all occupied.
However, unlike on the other islands, all but a handful of people on Alderney were evacuated. This paved the way for the island to be turned into a vast prison for slave workers constructing Hitler’s sea defences. In January 1942, therefore, four camps – Helgoland, Norderney, Sylt and Borkum – were set up for workers from so-called Operation Todt. Conventional wisdom is that the majority of those transported to the island were Russian prisoners of war. But the records show a significant proportion of those in the camps were Spanish Republicans, north African Arabs and French Jews.
The conditions on Alderney were appalling and, in common with other Nazi work camps, prisoners were beaten and starved. Many succumbed to disease. Those who could no longer work were sent to camps in mainland Europe where they were murdered. The overall numbers of those who died on the island is also the subject of academic controversy: the minimum estimate is between 700 and 1,000 people, but experts believe the actual figure could be much higher.
Immediately after the liberation of Alderney, two senior British soldiers, Major Cotton and Major Haddock, were sent to investigate war crimes. As a result, the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) office, the body responsible for bringing Nazis to justice, concluded the conditions were akin to those in other concentration camps in German-occupied territory: “The position here is somewhat similar to Belsen, stronger perhaps because the offences were committed on British territory.” A young captain, Theodore Pantcheff, was brought in to carry out a full investigation. In September 1945 he wrote: “Wicked and merciless crimes were carried out on British soil in the last three years.”
And yet Britain did not bring a single German officer to justice for what happened on Alderney. Instead, the authorities chose to focus on the Russian victims of the regime in the island’s camps and shift the responsibility for any investigation to the Soviet authorities. In October 1945, Pantcheff’s report was sent to Moscow, where it lay in the archives until 1993. The British copy was destroyed.
When the report finally came to light, it revealed that 15 suspected war criminals had been in British custody at the end of the war. In his memoirs, Pantcheff claimed that three of the most notorious of these, Maximilian List, Kurt Klebeck and Carl Hoffman, had not survived the war. This was untrue. Hauptsturmführer List was in charge of Sylt, the only SS camp on British territory. After the war, he
was traced to a British prisoner-of-war camp and was said to have been handed over to the Russians. In fact, he was living in Germany well into the 1970s. Obersturmführer Klebeck, List’s deputy, lived out his days in Hamburg, despite being convicted of other war crimes in 1947 and being the subject of German investigations in the 1960s and the 1990s.
Most shocking is the story of Major Hoffman, the Kommandant of Alderney and its four camps, who Pantcheff said had been handed over to the Russians and executed in Kyiv in 1945. The British government was forced to admit the truth in 1983: that Hoffman was taken from Alderney and held in the London Cage – for prisoners of war – until 1948, when he was released and allowed to return to Germany. He died peacefully in his bed in Hamelin, West Germany, in March 1974.
The story of Alderney is one of silence, state censorship and missed opportunities. Hoffman and the other war criminals should have faced justice immediately after the end of hostilities. The British government has never explained why it allowed them to go free nor why it pursued a policy of “Russification” of the atrocities committed on the island. But there is no doubt this was a conscious policy. The details are contained in Madeleine Bunting’s 1995 book, The Model Occupation. In it she said that Brigadier Shapcott from JAG wrote in 1945 that all the inmates on Alderney were Russian, and Britain’s Foreign Office concluded that “for practical purposes Russians may be considered to be the only occupants of these camps”. JAG also told the Foreign Office: “No atrocities were committed against the French Jews. On balance they were treated better than the others working for the Germans.”
There have been a number of attempts to correct the historical record by drawing attention to the camps on Alderney and the presence of Jewish prisoners. Most notable is the work of Jewish South African archaeologist Solomon H Steckoll, whose book The Alderney Death Camp was published in 1982 and serialised in The Observer newspaper. His direct, impassioned approach is captured in the cover blurb: “In 1943 the SS built a concentration camp on the British island of Alderney. Prisoners were worked as slaves, beaten, starved, hanged, garrotted, hurled from cliff-tops, even buried alive in setting concrete. Why have these horrific acts been kept from the public for so long?”
The Alderney Death Camp is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism driven by the author’s own burning sense of injustice. Many on Alderney dismissed it as a tabloid hatchet job. But it is nothing of the kind, not least because Steckoll made it his personal mission to find Hoffman and reveal the full scale of the British government’s cover-up. This will be his legacy.
Steckoll’s revelations prompted a grudging recognition from the British government that it had not told the truth about Hoffman. It did not, though, lead to full disclosure. Those files on the Channel Islands that had not been destroyed remained closed for at least another decade, when Labour MP David Winnick, who is Jewish, began campaigning for their release.
From May 1992, Winnick also pushed for an investigation into the war crimes on Alderney committed by Klebeck, who was by then known to be at large in Hamburg. By the end of the year, he had succeeded on both fronts (although no files released made any reference to Alderney). Winnick’s campaign was followed two years later by the publication of Bunting’s book. Nearly 30 years on it still bears scrutiny as a major piece of journalism; Bunting’s tone as she grapples with the British government’s decision-making is a mixture of shock and justified anger.
Her conclusion is stark: “Trials on British soil would have been an acutely embarrassing reminder to the British public of several painful facts about the war which the government wanted quickly forgotten: that British territory had been occupied for five years; that British subjects had collaborated and worked for the Germans on Alderney; and that Nazi atrocities, including the establishment of an SS concentration camp, had occurred on British soil.”
Silence on the island
One block on transparency has been the attitudes on Alderney itself. Academics and journalists have faced hostility on the island. Caroline Sturdy Colls, professor of conflict archaeology at Staffordshire University, was the first to apply modern forensic techniques to sites on Alderney. Her book, Adolf Island: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney, was published last year. Nearly 80 years after the end of the war, the subject of what really happened on Alderney remains highly sensitive among some residents who don’t want their island paradise to become part of what they see as the Holocaust industry.
“There are certainly some islanders who want to help memorialise the victims and tell their stories, so not everyone wants to forget,” Sturdy Colls told Index. “Those that do often provide reasons like not wanting the island to be tarnished by this dark history or not wanting tourism based on Nazi sites.”
The archaeologist said there were a host of other reasons why the subject of the camps on Alderney has proved controversial. “There are many people who still don’t recognise the crimes that were perpetrated as being part of the Nazi programme of persecution and/or the Holocaust. After the war, there was a conscious effort by the government to play down the atrocities that were carried out, and so a sanitised narrative emerged that a good proportion of the British public believed or chose to believe. Some of the islanders who went back to Alderney found it too painful to discuss what had happened there, whilst some residents after the war didn’t (and still don’t) want the island to be known for the occupation-era sites that exist there.”
There have been several key moments when a full and accurate narrative should have been told. Immediately after the war, the Pantcheff report could have led to a war crimes trial, but the British government chose to draw a veil over the atrocities.
The extraordinary work of Steckoll in 1982 could have prompted an inquiry, but instead it was dismissed as sensationalist. The combined efforts of Winnick in parliament and Bunting in the press could have opened the door in the mid-1990s, but again the government chose obfuscation rather than openness.
We have another such opportunity now. The mantle of Steckoll has been taken up by another Jewish investigator, Marcus Roberts, who is determined to pursue the truth about the Holocaust on British soil. He believes it is possible that between 15,000 and 30,000 people died on the island, with at least 1,000 being Jewish.
Roberts is the founder of the Jewish heritage charity JTrails. He began researching the Nazi camps of northern France in 2007. Two years later he turned his attention to the Channel Islands. He has been pushing for official recognition of Alderney as a Holocaust site, the establishment of an appropriate memorial and protection of Jewish graves. Roberts has established it was not just French Jews who were sent to Alderney; there were Jews from many from other parts of Europe and north Africa.
His research demonstrates that a considerable number of Jews are likely to have died on the island from dysentery and disease. His view is that the push for a Soviet inquiry was a smokescreen. Roberts told The Observer: “The way I read it is that the investigation regarding the Russians was undertaken first as a diversion from war crimes against other nationalities, but also there was definitely discussion in the papers we can read that they wanted to guarantee access to Allied war graves on Russian territory. It was also about plausible deniability.”
Although she has challenged the numbers cited by Roberts, Sturdy Colls also believes the scale of the Jewish atrocities has been downplayed. “It is evident from the wide range of testimonies available and from the surveys we did of the camps in which Jews were housed that they were treated appallingly, and more Jews likely died than we know of,” she said. “The conditions in which Jews were housed were an extension of those that they were kept in elsewhere in Europe. The camps on Alderney were part of a network of sites that housed Jews and harsh punishments, terrible working and living conditions, and torture characterised their lives on Alderney.”
She added that it was important to recognise the atrocities committed against other groups on Alderney – eastern Europeans and Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example. “Overall, the suffering of most of the people who were sent to Alderney and were under the control of Organisation Todt and the SS has been underplayed.”
The momentum towards full disclosure may now be irresistible. In recent years, investigative journalists
around the world have turned their attention to Alderney, and the story has been covered by The Sunday Times and ITV in the UK, Channel 9 in Australia, Der Spiegel in Germany and The Times of India. One of the most comprehensive investigations was carried out last year by Isobel Cockerell for the international online publication Coda Story.
Her article on Alderney has been nominated for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism. In it she asks the key questions: “Why did the British government let evidence of German war crimes on its soil … remain in obscurity? Why was no one prosecuted?” She says the islanders have a range of answers: collective shame at surrendering the islands and subsequent collaboration; the post-war focus on rebuilding the country; a view that the scale of the atrocities didn’t merit war crimes trials; and also that “no government wanted talk of Jewish murders on its soil”.
A record to correct
Events in the next few years may force the government’s hand and prompt ministers to correct the historical record. In 2024, the UK will take its turn as chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. The body is responsible for Holocaust education,remembrance and research around the
world. Lord Pickles is the UK’s special envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues and the head of the UK’s IHRA delegation. On visits to Alderney, Pickles has told islanders they need to come to terms with the troubled history of the camps and find a way of marking what happened with a respectful memorial.
Later this year, Pickles will announce an expert review of the numbers who died on Alderney and invite submissions from academics, researchers and members of the public. The IHRA is seeking to adopt a charter to safeguard all sites of the Holocaust in Europe. Gilly Carr, associate professor in archaeology at Cambridge University and chair of the IHRA Safeguarding Sites project, told Index: “Such sites play
a crucial role in educating current and future generations about the Holocaust and help us reflect on its consequences. In this charter we take a broad approach to what we consider to be a site of the Holocaust. Jews were held in camps in Alderney and we consider these to be Holocaust sites.”
Carr, like Sturdy Colls, believes the full story of Nazi atrocities has been downplayed in the past. “Certainly, the subject of victims of Nazism in the Channel Islands as a whole, a category within which I would include Jews, political prisoners and forced labourers, has come late to the table,” she said. “Because there were no war crimes trials resulting from the occupation of the Channel Islands, it became a ‘non-subject’ for many people.”
Carr has helped develop the concept of “taboo heritage”, where the legacy of war is so sensitive that people become resistant to the idea of full remembrance.
“Taboo heritage can become heritage in the end if it receives political support, but this usually takes a lot of time and investment by stakeholders,” she said.
Pickles is also co-chair of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, the body responsible for planning a
Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, which will be built in sight of the Houses of Parliament. British
exceptionalism will be at the heart of the new memorial.
It will celebrate the Kindertransport, the scheme to rescue 10,000 children from Nazi Germany in the nine months before the outbreak of war. It will also celebrate British heroes of the Holocaust, such as Sir Nicholas Winton, who helped rescue 669 children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of war.
There is now a commitment to putting the occupation of the Channel Islands at the heart of the memorial. But what happened here does not sit easily with this narrative of exceptionalism. The horrors of Alderney are a blot on Britain’s reputation, which is perhaps why the full story has been suppressed for so long. The slogan chosen for the memorial is “Confronting Evil, Assuming Responsibility”. Will we now confront the evil of the camps on Alderney and assume responsibility for covering up what happened there?
07 Jul 23 | China, Hong Kong, News and features, Opinion, Ruth's blog
Index has a proud history of providing a platform for dissidents, we exist to protect and promote the concept of freedom of expression not just as a fundamental human right, which it is, but also as the ultimate right in a democratic society. The creation of art, journalism, comedy, academia, plays, poetry, novels and even placards. These are the ultimate expressions of a free society and for those of us who are able to celebrate our own freedoms it is something we should cherish.
However in recent days we have been once again reminded of how quickly repression and dogma can overwhelm a notionally free society and how tyrants seek to not only control their own citizens at home but also to undermine their freedoms when they have escaped the boundaries of their former home nations.
This week’s case in point is China and Xi Jinping’s CCP. This has been yet another awful week for the people of Hong Kong and the global diaspora, especially those who seek to speak out against Xi’s rule. Under the guise of the National Security Law the Hong Kong Police Force has issued arrest warrants for eight political dissidents who live in democratic societies. Their ‘crime’ was to challenge the CCP’s efforts to end the One Nation, Two Systems constitutional settlement, which had been granted to Hong Kong when British sovereignty ceased to apply to the territory in 1997. In other words they sought to protect the democratic society that they had built in Hong Kong. (Read what two of the UK-based activists had to say here.)
Each of them has had to flee their homes in Hong Kong, leave their lives and their loved ones behind in order to ensure their own liberty. They now live in exile with little likelihood that they will ever be able to return. But even that isn’t enough for the Chinese government.
It’s incredibly important that we know and celebrate the bravery of the dissidents who the Chinese Communist Party fear – they represent thousands of others, but today we must say their names.
Kevin Yam
Ted Hui
Nathan Law
Elmer Yuen
Dennis Kwok
Mung Siu-tat
Lau Cho-dik
Anna Kwok
We are lucky to live in a democratic society and therefore we have a responsibility to protect those who have had to free their repressive governments in order to speak out. They inspire us, so we must protect them.
The National Security Law is a disgrace and the worst example of a coordinated effort of transnational repression. But it’s not just the eight Hongkongers who the CCP seek to silence. It’s the rest of us too.
Last week Index hosted an evening of art and culture created and performed by Chinese dissidents. It was an incredible evening and an amazing success. However in the run up to the event our website was attacked and the webpage advertising the event was corrupted. It was the only part of our website to be affected. One of our artists, Badiucao, was threatened and advised to not attend and had to be accompanied throughout his visit to London. In recent months we have documented exactly what is happening to Chinese dissidents who seek to speak out against the CCP in Europe and you can read all of our work on our new website – while it’s still up!
This week my friend Lord Leong spoke in the UK Parliament about how the CCP was seeking to silence people. So do end my blog today I am going to leave you with his words:
In closing, I will quote the opening verse of “Glory to Hong Kong”. It has become the anthem of their struggle. Brave individuals in Hong Kong have been arrested and detained for singing it. The Chinese Government are trying to remove all traces of the lyrics online. I know that if I say them here, in this Chamber at the heart of the mother of Parliaments, these words will be forever recorded in Hansard. This will, I hope, encourage those brave souls, by demonstrating that their voices are being heard on the other side of the world despite Beijing’s attempts to silence them:
“We pledge: No more tears on our land,
In wrath, doubts dispelled we make our stand.
Arise! Ye who would not be slaves again:
For Hong Kong, may freedom reign!”
07 Jul 23 | Belarus, News and features
It is hard to imagine something more damning as an indicator of press freedom than a leader banning the country’s journalism union and threatening penalties and jail for anyone who has dealings with it.
Yet this is what has been done by Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s Belarus, fast becoming a model for media repression. In February, the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) was designated by the authorities in the country as an “extremist formation”.
The authorities also identified eight people, including BAJ chair Andrey Bastunets, who now face up to ten years in prison for “establishing or participating” in the organisation. Others who have financed or “abetted” BAJ could also face jail time, arbitrary detentions, interrogations, and searches.
While another 20 media companies, most of the mainstream, independent Belarusian media, have also been given a similar label, this is the first human rights organisation to be designated thus.
Now the Belarusian authorities have gone a step further and BAJ’s website, social media accounts and logo have now been designated as “extremist materials”. Anyone disseminating the association’s content or merely liking an article on its social feeds could mean a 15 day stay in jail.
The situation is like Britain’s government putting the National Union of Journalists in the same category as Al Qaeda.
Journalists in Belarus, at least those who report critically about Lukashenka’s activities, are now under threat. Some are in jail – 34 media workers at the end of June) – despite Lukashenka this week telling the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg that there are no political prisoners in the country.
Other journalists have left the profession while others have fled abroad.
In spite of these attacks, Bastunets, speaking to Index about the challenges facing journalists, says the independent media of Belarus is far from dead.
“Those journalists who left the country face different challenges than their colleagues in Belarus,” he says, with particular problems in obtaining legal residency in host countries, the high cost of living and renting accommodation even though many of them have their own, now empty, apartments in Belarus.
“There is also the different legal environment, language problems, the sometimes discriminatory attitude to Belarusians as co-aggressors, …and, for some, psychological burn-out.”
Many of those who left Belarus expected to return in a month or two, he says.
“Repression has been going on for almost three years and it is not clear when it might stop. And if media outlets have mostly coped with relocation, survival, and the arrangement of their activities, new challenges await us if current trends persist. One of them is the necessity of accepting the fact that we are in exile for a long time.”
But rumours about the death of the independent media in Belarus are “exaggerated”, he says.
“Several influential media outlets are still working in the country. But, of course, their working conditions are extremely unfavourable. Journalists live under constant threat of raids, detentions, interrogations, and criminal prosecution.”
As a result, media organisations that still operate in Belarus have reinforced safety measures for their journalists as well as using even more secure communications protocols.
They are also self-censoring to some extent.
“Editorial boards have to take extra care when publishing pierces on sensitive issues – on government activities, on opposition, on the war in Ukraine, etc. – in order to minimise the risks,” says Bastunets.
In addition to media outlets with editorial offices in Belarus, there is also a large number of freelance journalists who continue to operate in the country but contribute, usually anonymously, to editors in exile.
This carries grave risks. On 30 June, cameraman Pavel Padabed was sentenced to four years in prison after being accused of cooperation with the Polish TV channel Belsat, which has also been recognised as an extremist formation.
There is plenty to report on.
The news two weekends ago that Alyaksandr Lukashenka, whose legitimacy as the leader of Belarus is contested, had acted as a “peacemaker” between Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin provided an interesting story for Belarusian media, both in and outside the country.
Lukashenka promised Prigozhin that could come to Belarus as part of a deal he claimed to have brokered to reduce the tension. Confusingly, he has since announced that Prigozhin is not in Belarus but in St Petersburg (or Moscow).
Most independent media actively covered the actions of Prigozhin and Wagner against the Russian Defence Ministry, with editors and commentators using a variety of terms – military uprising, putsch, coup attempt, march of justice, conflict – to describe it.
“State-run media outlets focused on ‘praising’ Lukashenka’s role in settlement of the conflict, which is questioned by many independent experts,” says Bastunets. “It is unknown whether Prigozhin and Wagner Group mercenaries are now in Belarus and whether they were or will be here at all. But there is a feeling that the Wagner mercenaries will not be welcome guests.”
If Prigozhin does turn out to be in Belarus, the country’s independent media are still there to report on it.
