When Belsat TV started broadcasting, Belarusians finally gained access to independent television news and the monopoly of public broadcasting tightly controlled by Aliaksandr Lukashenka was broken, the New York Times reports.
“Despite the European Union’s commitment to spreading democracy and human rights, Brussels has given no funding to Belsat TV. Late last year, money became so scarce that Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy, Belsat TV’s director, was forced to make programming cuts. “We simply ran out of money,” she said. Financial support, however, may be on its way through the European Endowment for Democracy, or E.E.D., which recently began operating in Brussels,” Judy Dempsey, editor in chief of Strategic Europe at Carnegie Europe, says in her article Cutting Red Tape on the E.U.’s Road to Change.
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