BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

11/11/2005

Belarus: State post office breaks contracts with three independent newspapers

/noticias.info/ State Post Office, Belposhta, which holds a monopoly in Belarus in distribution of the subscription press, on 9 November informed three independent newspapers that it was terminating their contracts at the end of January 2006.

Those affected were the country's leading independent daily Narodnaya Volya, as well as two independent weeklies Solidarnost and Zhoda.

The decision comes one month after state printers Krasnaya Zvezda and the company Belsajuzdruck, which hold a distribution monopoly in Belarus, unilaterally and without explanation broke their contracts with Narodnaya Volya and Solidarnost.

Since then, the two newspapers have been forced to go to Smolensk in Russia to get printed. Half the 30,000 print run of Narodnaya Volya was distributed by Belposhta, and the rest by volunteers. Because of the distance between Smolensk and Belarus the daily has been reduced to publishing three times a week.

Deputy editor of Narodnaya Volya, Svyatlana Kalinkina, is pessimistic about the newspaper's future, which could be forced into closure through lack of sales.

In an interview with the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ), the editor of Zhoda, Alyaksei Karol, expressed his fear that Belarus opposition newspapers would be driven into working underground as they did before the 1917 revolution and under the Soviet regime.

Source:

http://www.noticias.info/asp/aspComunicados.asp?nid=117288&src=0