De International Women’s Media Foundation heeft de Wit-Russische journaliste Irina Khalip de Courage in Journalism Award gekregen. Bij de uitreiking op 20 oktober in New York sprak Irina Khalip een dankwoord uit.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,

Thank you for this honorable award and for the possibility to address the high audience in this important moment for me.

I still cannot understand how it had happened. There was no putsch no junta, no sudden coup d’etat that was to be followed by a dictatorship. There was just Belarus, a young country in the center of Europe that barely started to identify itself after the Soviet Union. There were hopes for happiness, success, creativity, and honor for our own country. For me having grown up in the Soviet Union, the feeling of freedom has been a blissful discovery. I had an enormous desire to work in this new, free country.

I cannot recollect when it all started. Maybe when my paper was banned from printing houses in Belarus and we were bringing the whole circulation from a neighboring Lithuania? Or maybe when my colleagues started to be arrested for their professional activities? Or when after one of my articles was published they came to search my apartment? Or when the power rigged the election for the first time? Or when my friends, opponents to the power started to disappear one by one? When my father was beaten by the police in front of me? When I was beaten in front of my father? When my husband was arrested? Or maybe when the regime closed down the first paper for which I worked? Or the second? Or the third?

It doesn’t matter when it all started. What is important is that Belarus has become an unashamed dictatorship ironically situated in a comfortable center of Europe from where it looked like there was only one way to the international community – through European Union and NATO. Dictatorships don’t like journalists. They either destroy them or involve in propaganda that substitutes journalism for dictators.

All the papers in which I worked were closed down by the regime. The Russian “Novaya Gazeta” for which I work today is banned from Belarus, although several years ago it was on sale here. Many of my colleagues went through jail. For us, journalists the criminal code was amended to include an article “slander of president”. Hundreds of my colleagues were left without jobs because Lukashenko’s regime destroyed independent press. Every dictatorship is scared of open debates because it understands it is doomed to loose. And it uses very primitive means to avoid such debates: for them it is sufficient to close down the papers and to intimidate the journalists. Many of my colleagues started to work in propaganda, having lost the fight for the freedom of speech. Many emigrated not wanting to waste their lives fighting the dictatorship which, as they think, may prove to be eternal. I cannot blame them.

I was arrested four times. Three times criminal cases were instigated against me. Three papers in which I worked were closed down. I was threatened many times. But these are just figures. A line in my cv. I didn’t make my choice because of that. Truly, I didn’t have a choice. I live in a country where the freedom to choose died long ago together with civil rights and freedoms. I simply want to tell the truth about abduction and killing of politicians, about beatings of journalists. I simply cannot forget about my friends in jail, those whose husbands were killed, my colleagues less and less of whom still remain. I want my son who is two years old and who doesn’t yet understand what’s going on, to have no fear for me like all my relatives do. I want to tell the truth of what’s going on in Belarus. Especially now when something equally dangerous entered the world’s scene. I mean “realpoitik”. New trend in world’s politics that destroys all long years of our work and our sufferings, because pragmatic politicians decide that it’s easier to recognize dictatorships and cooperate with them then to waste efforts fighting them.

And then a moment comes when monsters like Lukashenko and Ahmadinejad become celebrities in glamour press. They are invited to summits where nobody wants to shake their hands but then we read big articles about them. And less can we read about what’s happening in our countries. We, the journalists of those countries that are painted black on a world map continue to write and talk about what’s happening in our countries. When we don’t have this possibility we will shout the news to you. Please listen to us.