BC-DX 789 05 Jan 2007 Private Verwendung der Meldun

Run by opponents of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, Radio Racja
(Truth) is helping wage an information war against a regime branded by
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as "Europe's last dictatorship".
Supported by the the Polish Foreign Ministry and Budapest-based Open
Society Institute founded by U.S. billionaire investor George Soros, Radio
Racja is one of only two independent stations broadcasting freely into
Belarus.
The station uses Web technology to mix popular music and social commentary
with uncensored news in both Belarussian and Russian, aiming to provide a
platform for both opposition parties and Belarussian bands, some of which
are banned at home.
"I dream of a free and independent Belarus," says editor-in-chief Wiktor
Stachwiuk, a 58-year-old exile. "I want to give Belarussians a taste of a
free society. Official media do not let them hear what is really going
on."
Lukashenko, in power since 1994, keeps a tight rein on the eastern
European country and its 10 million inhabitants, sandwiched between Poland
and Russia.
He rejects all criticism of his rule and has called for vigilance to keep
Belarus safe from Western "lies and violence". Opposition politicians and
journalists have disappeared and all media outlets face serious
restrictions.
Western countries accuse Lukashenko of systematic crackdowns on the
opposition and dismiss all Belarus elections over the last decade as
unfair. They say the president blatantly rigged elections last year to
engineer a landslide win for himself.
"I could not simply stand by and watch what was happening in my country
without doing anything," Stachwiuk said. He first set up Radio Racja in
1999 and it broadcast from the Polish capital of Warsaw until 2002.
INTIMIDATION
His Warsaw station eventually ran into financial problems and it took
Stachwiuk and his associates three more years to raise enough money to
launch the station in Bialystok, closer to Belarus and able to broadcast
deeper into the country.
It now has a budget of $1 million a year, half of which is spent on
transmitters: two in Poland and two in Lithuania.
Almost a year after its relaunch, Stachwiuk estimates Radio Racja, with a
staff of just 32, has an audience of up to 400,000 mostly in western
Belarus, plus tens of thousands of exiles, and says it is building up
rapidly on short and medium wave and on a newly launched FM band:
"The station can be heard well on medium wave all the way to (Belarus
capital) Minsk and can even be picked up in Finland."
The station has a small network of reporters, mostly working under
pseudonyms, across Belarus who record programmes using MP3 technology and
send them via the Internet to Bialystok or to one of two covert editing
stations in Belarus.
Radio Racja editors say their correspondents face daily harassment from
the Belarus authorities mostly just petty intimidation but occasionally
arrest and jail.