Used materials of www.milinkevich.org, www.svaboda.org

On the 6th of March Belarusian population had a rare chance to get  to alternative information by listening an appeal of the candidates to the presidential positions on the radio. But republican  radio station illegally cut some parts out of these speeches  while broadcasting oppositional appeal to Belarusian electorate.(09-MARCH-06)

Right to be heard.

According to  Electoral code of Belarus every candidate to the presidential position had a right to  be broadcasted by national  television  and  radio  in a peroid of electioneering. Only one of four candidates refused to use this possibility to be heard. It was Aleksandr Lukashenko.
   Central Electoral Committee (CEC)  has limited air time till one hour on television (twice for half an hour) and one hour on the radio ( twice for half an hour). CEC has also declined an offer of one of the candidates Aliaksandr Milinkevich to be broadcasted in  DIRECT AIRïðÿìîé ýôèð.

Skilled censors.
 On the 6th of March Milinkevich and Kazulin  presented their last speeches as the candidates to the presidential position to the Belarusian population.  Both of these speeches were censored. Kazilin’s  speech was shot of 6 minutes. It was a part where  he says about  Lukashenko’s past, about his children and Lukashenko’s quotation about Hitler to German newspaper “Handelsblat”.   

kazulin111“What did he do with our country? We are the country which made war upon Fascism and sacrificed with every third of our citizens- and for what? For Fascism could back to us as the state ideology? – said Kasulin.
 We need to notice that Kazulin’s previous television’s speech was shot of nine minutes because of the same reasons.  


State radio also threw away four paragraphs out of Milinkevich’s speech. There he commented Lukashenko’s mistakes about two  famous Belarusian writers: Skarina “who lived and worked in St. Petersburg” (in fact St. Petersburg was built in 200 years after Skarina’s death) and Bikov’s poems on which according to Lukashenko’s words he was brought up (in fact Bikov has never written poems).

milinkevich1111”Authority tries to hide its lack of education and weakness by the censorship of my speech”- announced Aleksandr Milinkevich-“ Authority’s propagandists are ashamed of their president who is a historian by his education but without historical memory.”  

Thus Belarusian radio station first of all  has violated the right of the population to get information and secondly the right of the candidates to be heard by their electorate in full measure.