The Polish newspaper
Gazeta Wyborcza
publishes daily the photo of its correspondent in Belarus, Andrzej Poczobut, along with a number.
This Wednesday the figure is 769. These are the days the reporter has been in prison.
Poczobut knows well the repression of the Aleksandr Lukashenko regime, which had already arrested him more than a dozen times.
On this occasion, however, the sentence has been harsher, with a sentence of eight years in prison.
On the day of freedom of the press, which is celebrated on May 3,
Gazeta Wyborcza
demands that the Belarusian authorities immediately release him.
A judge in the Belarusian city of Grodno sentenced Poczobut on February 8 to eight years in a maximum security prison for "incitement to hatred" and for "rehabilitation of Nazism."
He was also accused of "acting against the state" for having called for the imposition of sanctions on the regime.
Since October 2022, he has also been included in a list of alleged perpetrators of "terrorist actions" of the Belarusian KGB.
According to the Committee for the Defense of Journalists (CPJ), an independent NGO based in New York, the charges against him date back to his coverage of protests that the government violently repressed after the fraudulent elections. August 2020. The journalist, detained since March 25, 2021, has just turned 50 and is a well-known leader of the Union of Poles in Belarus, an organization representing the minority of Polish origin in Belarus.
They also presented statements against him in which he defended this group, to which he belongs, and others in which he described the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 as aggression.
Bartosz T. Wielinski, deputy editor of
Gazeta Wyborcza
, describes Poczobut as a "hero" and an "inspiration" to his peers.
"He is independent, loyal to the truth, calls things by his name, and is extremely brave," he says by phone, while demanding "his immediate release from him, without any conditions."
The Belarusian authorities tried to convince Poczobut, married with two children, to leave the country, a common practice of the Minsk regime.
They also offered him to send a clemency petition to Lukashenko.
He refused both proposals.
“He is very defiant and he is not going to ask this dictator for anything,” Wielinski notes.
The trial against the journalist – who in addition to writing for the newspaper (a partner of EL PAÍS in LENA, the Alliance of Leading Newspapers in Europe) collaborated with Belarusian and Polish media – began behind closed doors on January 16.
That day he could be seen briefly in court, in the cage in which the defendants appear.
The images of the dent that captivity was leaving on his face, skinnier and more scarred, left his companions deeply concerned about his state of health and about the treatment he receives in a prison system that they compare to the Soviet gulags.
Despite everything, he had not lost his expression and his defiant character towards the authorities, his colleagues also confirmed.
“Anti-Polish Campaign”
The Polish government has demanded the release of Poczobut on numerous occasions and has considered his arrest and conviction as "an element of the anti-Polish campaign of the Belarusian authorities".
The relationship between the two countries is at its lowest point.
In 2021, Poland, along with other neighboring states of Belarus that host hundreds of opponents and dissidents of the regime, denounced a campaign orchestrated by Lukashenko to send thousands of migrants and asylum seekers to the borders of the European Union.
The start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which Belarus has made itself available to the Kremlin as a launching pad, has further strained the already battered ties between the two.
One day after the conviction of Poczobut was announced, Warsaw ordered the closure of the Bobrowniki border crossing and announced that it would expand the list of those sanctioned for attacking the population of Polish origin in Belarus, which according to the 2019 census amounts to some 300,000 people.
Belarus holds the dubious record of being the country in Europe with the most detained journalists, ahead of Russia, according to February data from the European Federation of Journalists.
The 32 informers are a fraction of the 1,500 political prisoners of the regime.
Poczobut has been in the crosshairs of the Belarusian authorities for more than a decade for his information activity and for defending the interests of the Polish minority.
In 2011, he was sentenced to a fine and 15 days in jail for "participation in an unauthorized demonstration" after the 2010 elections. In 2011 and 2012 he was also arrested, accused of defaming Lukashenko on reports about him.
"He is a citizen of a country where they have lived under a dictatorship for 30 years and he is an independent journalist who has dared to fight for his rights," concludes Wielinski, who wants Poczobut to know that his colleagues are not forget.
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