Appreciate the concerns raised above regarding belarusian language being ’sidelined’ but i guess the BBC could argue taht russian IS one of official languages in belarus, and so there is no need to broadcast in belarusian (unlike ukraine, where ukraine is the only ‘official’ language). To this extent the BBC does not have responsibility to promote people’s national languages/cultures but to broadcast ‘impartial’ information. Thus if russian is an official language and spoken/understood by the a very very large proportion of the population (as is the case in Belarus) then the is no case (let alone a business case!) for them to broadcast in Belarusian.

on the point of a vacum of information. yes, limited access but the impression that is given is that people, if they want, can access alternative sources of information than to the state tv. e.g. internet access, cable tv and RFL! So to claim an information vacum exists is factual incorrect.

re minister’s job. Douglas Alexander is no longer Europe Minister. What someone maybe trying to say re the official position is that it is more of what is called a ‘portfolio position’ . this happens in British gvt. People are given jobs that effectively are to keep people happy/reward them. For example the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or worse still as the recent reshuffle has shown the Deputy PM of Britain seems to now have this kind of role! that is not to say that writing to them doesn’t yeild an effect, and yes they are still invite to cabinet, and may say a few things but their powers are limited and no where close to those of a ’serious’ minister (which conincidently Douglas Alexander now is)
PS it might be worth writing/lobbying the British Amb in minsk, Brain Bennett. by the sounds of things he would sympathetic to the plight of promoting Belarusian language (which version is another isssue!). Address/contact details can be found at:
www.britishembassy.gov.uk/belarus
if everyone sends him e-mail/letter he might put pressure on FCO to do something. especially as it would help their project

oh_meow
2006-05-08 02:43 pm UTC

The point is though, that although the BBC are keen to provide open information to countries with restrictive governments, it is not their main purpose and not the area where the majority of their funds are targeted. The BBC’s purpose is to provide advert-free, high quality entertainment, education programmes and news to people in the UK, who are required by law to pay £120 per year to the BBC for the privelige of receiving tv. They are a not a charity or a humanitarian organisation, they are a broadcasting company, and although they do provide humanitarian broadcasting services such as worldwide radio in different languages, it comes second to them providing the services that receiving the tv licence fee legally binds them to providing. i.e. tv shows for the UK. Any extra money has to be shared out between a vast number of different operations, and setting up an effective extra radio service for a country with incredibly tight media censorship that speaks what is essentially a minority language but whose people can generally understand the similar languages of neighbouring countries, and who can pick up the already existing bbc world service broadcasts in these languages in the limited areas which the new service would be able to be broadcast is probably not top of their huge list of things to spend a limited amount of available money on. If the EU decided to put pressure on the Belarusian government, and provided funding for the BBCs broadcasts, I’m sure they would do it. But the BBC can’t cover everything.

By the way, writing to the UK Government to get the BBC to do something is utterly pointless. The Government has absolutely no control over the BBC whatsoever, for plenty of good reasons. The BBC are an independent organisation.

2006-05-08 03:58 pm UTC

If BBC is an independent organization, how come your minister makes statements on behalf of BBC?

oh_meow
2006-05-08 04:16 pm

That man is not the “EU minister” anyway, there is no such thing, he was a junior officer at the foreign office (headed by the Foreign Secretary), and he is now in charge of Transport so that quote is a bit out of date. Their inability to fact check makes me dubious of their ability to correctly quote people. Maybe it was just a poor translation, but the article was unclear and jumbled.

2006-05-08 05:02 pm UTC

> there is no such thing

English Wikpedia says he’s a Minister of State for Europe of the British cabinet.

“The Minister of State for Europe is an executive position in the Government of the United Kingdom, in charge of affairs with the European Union.”

oh_meow
2006-05-08 05:05 pm UTC

yes but that is a new, kind of half-cabinet position. We submit politicians as special EU parliament ministers, and they are the people who really sort out the EU stuff. The UK government is a bit perverse in titles, often the people with important sounding titles aren’t, and the really important ones are called something like “secretary”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament EU stuff is done here by collaboration between MEPs from all the EU countries

evig_lilje
2006-05-08 03:00 pm UTC

I think it’s kind of funny that in that article it shows all the languages saying (presumably) “BBC World” and then the fake Belarusian one says “BBC Belarus” (or Belarussian?) instead of “World”.

2006-05-08 04:03 pm UTC
It should’ve been “сьвет” then. :)

pne
2006-05-08 07:17 pm UTC
You presume wrongly; the top three are “Farsi”, “`Arabi”, and “Urdu”, respectively.

targaff
2006-05-08 10:07 pm UTC

I know you and I have had our difference in the past, but in all honesty, even if he had correctly addressed the question I suspect that the answer would have fallen back on the issue of practicality: it is more viable for them commercially to put out a single broadcast in a language that is likely to reach as wide an audience as possible (a quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that Russian is a language that is at least understood by about 250 million people) than to cater for a comparatively small audience (7-8 million). It would be nice if they were able to do that, but the fact is that economically at least, the numbers are unfortunately stacked against you.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that he might have deliberately “dodged the issue”, if you will. From reading things you have written in the past (though I can’t find this on your blog; don’t you have a standing website on the topic, too?), my understanding is that the (rightly or wrongly) ruling bodies prefer Russian as the national language over Belarusian, whose status as an official language thus (again, rightly or wrongly) seems - officially - to be nominal, at least internally. To that end, the British government is likely to at least honour that whether they agree with it or not until such time as the situation changes. “Ah, but this is the BBC!” I hear you cry, but it is important to note that for all its supposed independence, the BBC’s Charter is still one granted by the nation, and so it is entirely possible that even if they sympathise, they would still not broadcast in Belarusian on diplomatic grounds; it would be unusual in those circumstances for the national broadcaster from another country to do something that might be perceived as being outright antagonistic (not to mention contrary to their purported neutrality in such matters).

I don’t necessarily agree with that, of course, but I can see where they might be coming from.

In response, it IS possible to reach even Minsk using FM waves. Reception would be near horrible but it is possible. Ive received FM transmissions from as far as Berlin using a really cheap radio set by connecting it to some water pipes.

As Administrator said… independent news reports have been reduced to pretty much non-existent. Everything currently available is state-run propaganda. Also a large majority is spoken / written in Russian. To preserve Belarusian language, a key part would be to have atleast a few sources of media in Belarusian so people would be able to use this language. Anyone whom speaks more than one language knows that if you dont use something for a long time, you start to forget things. The propaganda currently being broadcasted also affects people’s look upon the regime. Everything bad is hidden, stories are made up to make things look better etc etc. People like the image that is created for them, despite it being very flawed.

K does have a point. Like Google’s search filter for China, it is most likely that the BBC ran into problems while making agreements with the regime to create any such service. Google yielded by altering their search engine to meet the desires of the Chinese government. The BBC’s only option would be to transmit in Russian but that would completely annialate the point of setting up a Belarusian service.