(C) Freedom House
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Truth in Exile: Belarusian Media Defies Physical, Digital Borders [1]
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Date: 2024-11
Dictators see independent media as an existential threat, so it’s no surprise that Belarus’s Alyaksandr Lukashenka wants to crush media freedom in his country. What is surprising is the extent to which he has been able to do so. After stealing the presidential election in 2020, Lukashenka transformed Belarus into one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. Dozens of media workers have been jailed and hundreds more forced into exile.
Among them are the staff of Nasha Niva, Belarus’s oldest newspaper. Nasha Niva drew the Lukashenka regime’s ire by reporting on the massive peaceful protests that followed the 2020 election. Tensions escalated when riot police shot a Nasha Niva reporter with a rubber bullet during a demonstration that August.
In July 2021, Lukashenka’s henchmen raided Nasha Niva’s offices, permanently blocked the organization’s website, and arrested four employees, two of whom were sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Those who escaped imprisonment left for Vilnius, separated from their audience by both physical and digital borders. Among them was Nastassia Rouda, Nasha Niva’s director.
“Our audience loves Belarusian identity and culture. That has been the primary difference between us and other media,” Rouda says. “We’re trying to keep that unique identity alive by writing in the Belarusian language.”
According to Rouda, Nasha Niva has served as a protector of Belarusian language and culture since its founding in 1906. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the paper reasserted itself as a driver of the Belarusian zeitgeist. When print gave way to the internet, Nasha Niva’s website became the world’s most visited Belarusian-language resource.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Belarusian language was banned or suppressed in favor of Russian. After Lukashenka came to power in 1994, he established Russian as a state language—part of his ploy to curry favor with Russia and, eventually, with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who cosigns his loan on power. Speaking and publishing in Belarusian became a political statement.
“Our main mission is to spread the Belarusian language as widely as possible,” Rouda says. “We write about everything—from sex, to politics, to pop stars—in Belarusian, so that people can continue to read it. Even though the language is spoken in only a fraction of homes in Belarus, people still read and understand things in that language. It’s the language inside their heads.”
Breaking the digital blockade
Blocking Nasha Niva’s website should have imperiled its mission, but one doesn’t survive the reigns of czars, Nazis, and Soviets without learning how to adapt. Since Lukashenka’s postelection crackdown, Belarusians are more desperate for truthful reporting than ever, and many use virtual private networks (VPNs) to evade the block. According to Rouda, “Traffic to our website has recovered to essentially what it was before the blockage. We cannot say exactly what percentage of that audience is from Belarus, but it’s more than 50 percent.”
Nasha Niva has also greatly expanded its footprint on social media, which remains largely uncensored in Belarus. Doing so required evolving and expanding its content strategy to include short-form video and splashy graphics, but the effort paid off. Nasha Niva’s YouTube channels have tens of thousands of subscribers, and more than 80 percent of their views come from Belarus. On TikTok, Nasha Niva has accumulated over 34,000 followers and millions of views.
“TikTok is super popular in Belarus,” Rouda says. “It is free, easy to use, and it offers us deniability. People choose what they want to watch on YouTube—but on TikTok, the platform decides what you will watch. The police can’t intervene because it was the platform that served the audience our content. And if someone is watching content like ours, the algorithms will show them more of the same.”
As such, Nasha Niva has accomplished a rare feat—using social media not only to reach a larger audience, but also to inject truth into the realm of disinformation.
“We’re not heroes to them anymore”
Belarus is one of the least free countries on earth, ruled by a ruthless thug who largely owes his station to an even more ruthless thug. That Nasha Niva exists despite Lukashenka’s tyranny is remarkable. That it publishes so prolifically is miraculous. That it overcame a website blackout by evolving into a diversified digital media organization, feeding old and new audiences a steady diet of truth-to-power? It’s almost too good to be true.
In some respects, it is. Nasha Niva has won many battles against Lukashenka, but the war rages on. It’s an unfair fight.
“In 2020, we were heroes to people inside the country,” Rouda says. “Everyone saw hope in us. People willingly sent us information, we had a strong connection with our audience, and everyone understood the importance of our job.
“But over the last four years, Lukashenka has tried to make people believe that we are the real threat—not him. He’s convincing people that the media is putting them at risk . . . that it will be bad for them if we write about them. And I have to say, it works. . . . Our sources are pulling away. We are not heroes to them anymore.”
Rouda and her team know that their work, though more difficult, has never been more essential. Nasha Niva is not alone. Several Belarusian media organizations are also operating tirelessly from exile—Zerkalo, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Belarus Service, Pozirk, Euroradio, and others. They know Lukashenka’s days are numbered. When he falls, these organizations will do their part to establish the fundamental freedoms that Belarusians deserve.
Nasha Niva has prepared for that day by improving access to funding, expanding its staff, and securing adequate office space—luxuries it was denied in Minsk. It has kept its Belarusian audience intact and deeply informed. In time that audience, exhausted by years of propaganda and desperate for truth, will again recognize Belarusian journalists for what they are: heroes.
“We don’t know what will happen,” Rouda says. “We’re just doing what we’re doing. The window of opportunity will come, and then it will be time to make something happen.
“For now, we wait.”
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