Journalists, activists targeted in new raids

KYIV (AP):

Authorities in Belarus raided homes and offices of journalists and human-rights activists on Tuesday in the latest move to squelch protests against authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Police searched the offices of the Belarusian Association of Journalists and the Viasna human rights centre as well as the apartments of its members, confiscating their equipment. More than 30 people were briefly detained, and at least three remained in police custody, according to activists.

Europe’s top human-rights envoy denounced the searches and detentions in Belarus as unacceptable.

“Freedoms of expression, association and assembly should be ensured according to international human rights standards,” the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, Dunja Mijatovic, said on Twitter.

The leader of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, Andrei Bastunets, was one of those detained and later released.

“This is the largest crackdown ever on journalists and rights activists Europe has ever seen,” said the association’s vice-president, Boris Goretsky, whose home also was searched. “There have been more than 400 detentions of journalists over the last six months, and the authorities aren’t going to stop at that.”

At least 10 of them faced criminal charges and remained in custody.

The authorities on Tuesday also raided the head office of the Viasna human rights centre in Minsk and searched the apartments of several of its activists, including the group’s head, Ales Bialiatski.

“This is an attempt to intimidate journalists and human-rights activists who have been telling the world about the unbelievable scale of repressions,” said Viasna’s deputy head, Valiantsin Stefanovic.

At least three Visna activists have remained in police custody after their detention earlier on Tuesday.

Belarus has been rocked by protests since official results from the August 9 presidential election gave Lukashenko a sixth term by a landslide. The main opposition candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, and her supporters have dismissed the result as rigged, and some poll workers also have described voting manipulation.

Authorities have responded to protests, the biggest of which attracted up to 200,000 people, with a sweeping crackdown. According to human-rights advocates, more than 30,000 people have been detained since the protests began, and thousands of them were brutally beaten.