In a single day, Daria Txultsova’s life changed forever. Little did this young Belarusian journalist expect that she would spend two birthdays in prison for doing her job. “I couldn’t even fit the experience into 400 pages. It wasn’t easy, but it made me tougher,” she says in statements to La Vanguardia from Warsaw, where she has lived in exile since her release.
On the day she was arrested, Daria and her colleague, fellow journalist Katerina Bakhvalova, were covering a rally in Minsk in memory of the oppositionist Roman Bondarenko, beaten to death by supporters of Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime three days earlier. It was November 15, 2020, and it had been three months since protests broke out over alleged electoral fraud in Belarus, and thousands of citizens were on the streets to demand an end to the repression and the resignation of the Belarusian authoritarian leader.
They were broadcasting the protests live from an apartment overlooking Minsk’s Exchange Square when a group of policemen broke into the building and arrested them. “In those moments you have many thoughts at the same time”, declares DÃ ria, who was only 23 years old when she was arrested. “You think if they will beat you, where they will take you, how many days they will sentence you to and what will happen to all the work material, but above all you have in mind the family members who will worry again”, he remembers.
After getting into the police vans, Chultsova and Bakhvalova did not see each other again until the day of the trial, when they were sentenced to two years in the penal colony for “organizing and preparing actions that violate public order”. Bakhvalova, who is still in prison, received an additional 8-year sentence for “treason”.
DÃ ria does not give details of the time she has spent behind bars, but, far from sinking her, it has given her more strength. “It’s been a strange experience, but I can channel it to do something useful,” she says, convinced that the best contribution to the opposition struggle is to keep doing her job. He continues to work on the Belarusian channel Belsat TV, now from the international program This is so. In fact, at the time of the interview, he had just returned from Ukraine to cover how infrastructure is being restored. She does not lose sight of the irony of feeling safer traveling to a country at war than to Belarus where, at least on paper, there is a democratic regime.
“If not, I could end up behind bars again. It’s not safe to go back now.” Daria’s fear is more than justified with the reprisals against journalists that the Lukashenko regime has taken in recent years. Although on Monday we heard the news of the pardon of Roman Protassévich – who was arrested after diverting a Ryanair flight to Minsk -, his ex-partner, the Russian blogger Sofia Sapega, who was also on the plane that was diverted, he remains in prison, serving the 6-year sentence imposed by the justice system in Minsk. Likewise, two more journalists from the opposition media Nexa were sentenced to 8 and 20 years in prison at the beginning of May.
Belarus has the sad privilege of occupying the fifth place in the ranking of countries with the most imprisoned journalists, and stands out for having a large number of female journalists behind bars. According to figures from Reporters Without Borders, there are currently 37 journalists imprisoned, of which 10 are women. In addition, the Association of Journalists of Belarus claims that 400 journalists from the country have been forced to flee abroad, and most of those who have stayed are working clandestinely. They are often arrested, searched, sometimes assaulted and ill-treated by Belarusian forces.
“The difficulties of doing independent journalism in Belarus are many. Almost everyone who tries is forced to leave the country”, warns Txultsova, who adds that those who stay “are very brave people”.
Reporting from abroad, although it means more freedom, also has many limitations: “Not being able to be in the country we write about prevents us from doing interviews on the street and getting to know people’s opinions. We cannot record stories or cover everything that needs to be coveredâ€. But despite this, Txultsova claims that journalists do an essential task “transmitting truthful information to Belarusians about what is happening in the country”.
