Cameraman Yury Bobenko and reporter Aleksey Malkov of pro-Kremlin NTV channel will hardly keep warm memories about visiting a neighboring state, which is still formally the closest ally of Moscow.
After being under permanent surveillance for some time, they were detained in their hotel by Belarusian special service officers in the evening 14 August.
“They took us to a van and brought outside Minsk, I do not know why. Then they interrogated us and drove to city of Orsha, close to Russian border. There they put us to the train to Moscow”, – Mr Bobenko told in an interview for “Euroradio for Belarus” (in Belarusian).
The details of the story became clear only several days after, as the officers seized the journalists’ SIM-cards, so that they remained out of coverage for some time and seemed missing themselves.
During the “forest interrogation” the officers questioned the Russians about their activities in Belarus. They seized all the materials Bobenko and Malkov had filmed there – including interviews with relatives and family members of the disappeared persons.
The journalists worked for the Emergency and Investigations program. They filmed a documentary about Belarusian public figures who had disappeared in Belarus in 1999 and 2000, leaders of opposition Viktar Hanchar and Yury Zakharanka, a businessman Anatol Krasouski and a journalist Dzmitry Zavadski.
A formal reason to expel the journalists was the lack of accreditation by Belarusian Foreign Ministry. It is a common pretext for prosecuting employees of foreign media in Belarus, though lawyers and human rights defenders say it is in odds with the Belarusian law and the freedom of media.
Missing people’s relatives want to know the answer
A decade after the disappearances started, Zinaida Hanchar, a wife of a former Vice-Chairman of Belarusian parliament, and Volha Zavadskaya, a mother of the ORT cameraman want to know the truth where their husband and son are.
As there is, in fact, no hope to find them alive, the women are still searching for the true answers about their destinies and the role of Belarusian officials in these cases.
During a press-conference in Vilnius on 20 August, they pledged both Lithuanian state and the governments of the biggest powers of Europe and the USA, to do something to force the Belarusian authorities to address the issue – whether in the National Assembly of Belarus, in the Prosecutor’s Office or the Constitutional Court.
The formal procedures of investigating the case by the Belarusian authorities is not something they can believe, they say.
“Nothing has been done, nothing has been revealed. We have done everything we can do in Belarus to get the answers – they never want to talk to us, they only write formal answers that investigation is still under way”, – Mrs Hanchar told journalists in Vilnius.
At the same time, the relatives of the missing Hanchar and Zavadski, as well as an expert and a potential witness of the case Aleh Alkayeu, told at the conference it is hardly possible to have a real investigation of the case under the current President of Belarus Aliaksandr Lukashenka.
According to the memorandum of PACE Special Rapporteur Christos Pourgourides “Disappeared In Belarus”, Lukashenka‘s former close allies and members of the Government are named among allegedly involved in abductions (murders) of the journalist and Belarusian opposition leaders.
