br23 blog - minsk, belarus

Belarus Opposition Wants More Focused Support From The EU:

EU must look beyond the routine monitoring of the polls. “I would recommend and I would ask you [that is, the EU countries] to send as many people — even without observer status because that’s not about the observation per se but the support of the people who would act after the day of the elections,” Romanchuk said. “Primarily, people should come one, two days before the elections and then will stay for another two days because I think the main event would be on 20 March. Then will be like the clash of forces, and that will be kind of the reality of this political campaign.”

…Romanchuk said the EU’s recent support for outside media broadcasts is “important,” but has very little impact. He said Deutsche Welle, which began EU-funded broadcasts last autumn in Russian, reaches a very limited audience.

“As for Deutsche Welle, the controversy is not in the language, of course, of broadcasting, when we design programs for Belarus, we should really know what’s going on there, what people know, how they get information,” Romanchuk said. “I think that even in the expert community, [the proportion of] people who know [how] Deutsche Welle can be heard is like 1 percent. So, [for] the general public if you want to send a message to Belarusians about the situation in the European Union, the situation in their own country, Deutsche Welle probably is the least feasible and the least useful means.”

Romanchuk said that to promote Deutsche Welle would take a lot of time and money. Instead, he said, the EU should seek to coordinate its media programs with Radio Liberty, which he said remains by far the most popular independent radio station in Belarus.

That’s a pretty good piece of advice to Brussels officials (I’m not sure if they’ll heed it though). And I don’t quite agree that language of broadcasting is not important. I think, it is a big issue.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 1:15 am and is filed under Belarusian politics, Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.