A decade and a half on the air. 'Belsat seemed to be a difficult task to pursuit.'
– Fifteen years ago, Belsat seemed to be a fantastic but unrealistic project, and today it is a much-needed source of information for Belarusians and Polish people about Belarus, says Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy, director of Belsat. Our TV station has been operating for fifteen years, launching on December 10, 2007.
– Where did the idea for Belsat come from 15 years ago?
– The idea at the beginning was wishful thinking for real success. It was an absolute fantasy. Looking back, I’m surprised we took on such a blue-sky business-wise challenge.
In 2004-2005 I went to Belarus as a correspondent for TVP. There was a disturbing quarrel with the Union of Poles in Belarus then. UPB had new authorities, which Alyaksandr Lukashenka did not accept. After six months and TVP’s decision to open a permanent correspondent place in Belarus, I flew to Minsk to be in charge of this site in December 2005. Unfortunately – I was not allowed to become a correspondent then. The KGB detained me at Minsk airport, it led to my deportation from Belarus. They destroyed all my life plans. I sat at the airport and cried. I was so sure that I would not see my Belarusian friends again. I had the Eureka moment about creating a TV channel for our Slavic neighbors then.
Belarusians watch TVP anyway as an alternative to regime media coverage.
Belarusians recognized me on the street because they knew me from TVP. Since I couldn’t be a correspondent there and TVP was not allowed to broadcast in this country, a TV station was necessary to launch for people from Belarus. Besides, when something was happening in Belarus, TVP was interested, and Belarusians had something to watch, but there were few Belarusian topics daily. I decided that Belarusians deserved information more often than once a week.
We knew Lukashenka was not yet resistant to outside influence and political pressure. I looked at Belarus through the experience of communism. After all, the communist authorities were not that resistant to Western influence.
They were dependent but were not immune enough to outside influence and, for example, to pressure from the West. I imagined that it would be a similar case with Belarus.
One more thing was crucial. I met many people from the opposition there. I traveled with Paval Majaikha, who is in prison today, to Paval Siaviaryniec from Belarusian Christian Democracy, who was also in jail then and is under arrest again now.
I believe that when there is opposition, something will eventually be born out of it, although it may be a long process.
My experience of the opposition during the communist era in Poland also guided me. I grew up with that experience. One thing I knew for sure. People in the opposition have to do something. In Poland, it was a publishing movement. Someone was writing, someone was printing, and someone was distributing. Something was going on in the underground. Of course, we no longer have the days of ‘illegally’ printed newspapers. I thought television could have a more significant impact on public opinion then. There will be a movement. Someone will prepare content, someone will record it, and someone will watch it, talk about it, and discuss it.
– The idea itself is only a part of the project. Support was needed, simply a sponsor, because television is an expensive investment.
– Belsat seemed like a great challenge – we needed money. On the other hand, I thought: why should Poland not help to build such a TV station for Belarusians? We, after all, had Radio Liberty and other media financed by the West during the communist era.
However, I must admit my search for financial funds succeeded because I followed the line of the former opposition. I appealed to the sensitivity and kindness of people who had grown up fighting the regime and understood the situation.
In 2006, the first committee, was established to assess the need for a TV station.
– This was a significant advantage and change from pre-existing media, such as Radio Svoboda. A completely new informative channel. No longer a newspaper or radio, but television.
– With the miniaturization of equipment and technological progress, it was possible. Today, it is a different world in the sphere of audiovisual technology. Those 15 years ago, however, there were already small cameras and cassettes, and large and heavy Betacam cameras were no longer necessary. This progress made the job much easier for reporters starting on television. And I was convinced that we were already living in the pictorial age, and the picture had to be there.
I had a reflection from Chechnya. There is a saying: ‘what is out of sight is out of the heart.’ As long as loads of footage from the first war in Chechnya were on television, the world was interested in it. During the second Chechen war, Vladimir Putin completely uprooted the media, including supporting and covering the kidnapping of journalists – and there was no TV coverage. The world began to forget about Chechnya, and Putin, with Akhmad Kadyrov, committed crimes and eventually pacified the Chechens. So there must be plenty of videos!
– The viewers of Belsat were initially Belarusians. So when did the idea arise that Polish people should also get some information?
– Well, it was also a complex matter. We concluded that it was necessary to reach out to Polish people as well since Poland is the primary sponsor of Belsat. We thought it would be a more international project, but despite the undoubted help, for example, from the US or the Netherlands, it is still a project that is primarily Polish. And since it is such, it is valid to explain the importance of this channel to Polish people. Convince them that it is needed.
We also concluded that, except for specialists, people are unaware of what is happening in the East. Although it is close, we – especially after Poland joined the EU – turned our backs on the East. At the beginning of the 1990s, as soon as the border with the USSR opened, people traveled there a little out of curiosity, sometimes trying to find old family ties, and then the East for Polish people was already rather gray, uninteresting, a little dangerous compared to the West.
From today’s perspective, we can see how right it was to build Belsat as a medium aimed at Polish people to inform them about the East. Now knowledge and understanding of the processes taking place beyond our eastern borders are essential, and it is even a matter of state security.
– When was the moment that Belsat became a source of information about the East for Polish people? Was it 2020 or earlier?
– We started making the portal earlier. However, it was not yet to be so popular. First, as translations of Belarusian texts, we quickly concluded that there are better ways than this. Simply copying is impossible to translate one national ‘market’ into another. It turned out, however, that Polish people will almost always be interested in a different type of news than Belarusians. They both will emphasize various things.
Then there was 2020 – the protests in Belarus and then the war in Ukraine. Belsat undoubtedly grew out of these events as an essential source of information. We started to do our Polish-language social media.
– Over the years, however, there have been multiple discussions about whether or not to abolish this Belsat as unnecessary, hardly watched, and even downright harmful to Polish-Belarusian relations. And here it turned out that this Belsat has people who know what’s going on there. For example, the station became one of the primary sources of information about the 2020 protests.
– I had a sense of a certain unreality.
For many years, we had a deeper insight into what was going on in Belarus than any services or even many analysts. We knew what was going on there. I had that knowledge.
In 2015, I re-traveled to Belarus after a long break. Since then, we have been building a network there. I would come to Minsk later and see our field studio, our recorded programs, and stand-ups being recorded downtown by our journalists – television was developing. Yes, someone got detained, and we had to pay a financial fee now and then, but the business was running full steam.
I traveled to Belarus each year. I talked to people and tried to figure out with all my senses what was going on there. The last time I was in Belarus was in 2019.
And then, in November 2019, I saw a crowd of Belarusians in Vilnius at the January insurgents’ funeral. At the head, the presidents of Poland and Lithuania, honorary companies, and behind them went Belarusians. Thousands of Belarusians. I knew something of a pleasant nature started surfacing.
It’s all about sensing the public mood and awareness, something you can’t see but can sometimes be decisive for future events.
When you have teams there, people, you know what the mood is – in detail. We reported that in 2017, there were large demonstrations in Kobryn, Rechytsa, and Pinsk. And these are small cities in total. It was clear to me even then that something’s up. Poland and its institutions were not ready for what happened. In 2020, we saw our YouTube viewership and social media views grow exponentially. It will not be empty self praise if I say that no organization had a better orientation and knew what was happening in Belarus better than Belsat.
– What contribution did Belsat make to informing Belarusians about the situation in their country and the outside world? What allowed them to confront these two realities and arguably greatly influenced the 2020 wave of protests?
– This is a difficult to assess. All the independent media affected Belarusians. The way public consciousness changes is a very mysterious and challenging story to grasp. But undoubtedly, we were already one of the more powerful media in Belarus before 2020. For example, in the beginning, compared to Tut.by we were small. And already in 2020, we were supposed to do projects together as partners, and there was no fundamental disparity between us. The tactic of different ways of reaching the audience: satellite, Internet, and social networks – had an effect. Once, for example, Radio Svaboda reported from the hometown of Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich.
Svaboda’s journalists asked the local kolkhoz workers if they knew that the writer had won the Nobel Prize; they admitted awareness about it because Belsat reported this news. I was satisfied when I thought the Belarusian channel was reaching out to the workers in some towns.
– How was the Belsat team formed? What attracted young Belarusians to work for the station?
– When I started working, I felt Belarusian journalists were the best educated in the world. They had so many different courses because every foundation was doing some training for them. They only had no place to work because there were very few free media. Our journalists’ first selection got done on the spur of the moment. One of our co-workers, a Polish woman, went to Belarus to different towns and looked for people. Then there was a course in Falenica. From successive groups, we selected 1/3, which we trained further because we thought they were suitable.
We had instructors from various Polish stations. We had a rule that we didn’t take people from Belarusian television, so those first journalists didn’t know where the camera had a lens. In one sentence, they had no idea about TV work, but they were given a camera, had to shoot, then edit.
– Was this process a kind of guerrilla journalism?
– Absolutely. I had not managed a big company before, I was a reporter, but I learned to do it. If a person wants to, so can learn many things. A lot of these people from a primary team remained on the job. I prefer to avoid frequent crew replacements, and I like people associated with the company. Of course, some people left, luckily, with few exceptions, in most cases in harmony, but quite several people have been with us from the beginning – until today.
– How many people were working in Belarus at that peak before August 2020?
– We evacuated more than 100 people from Belarus (primarily to Ukraine). People were working with accreditation lent by befriended media. And sometimes without them. We did most of our cyclical programs in Belarus.
– Did the regime tolerate this?
– At first, the regime did not take Belsat seriously. They thought the Polish people had gone mad and would quickly close this Belsat. In 2008, they paid attention to us. They raided our offices. Then it turned out they still needed to have all our people identified. It was also clear that even if they caught everyone and destroyed our outlets, they still would not completely close Belsat because we have a second ‘leg’ in Poland. This idea worked. After we had to evacuate most of our people from Belarus, we continued to work from Poland.
Lukashenka’s regime to compete with Belsat
Why did they not terminate us right away, even before August 2020? There needed to be more precise guidelines. Of course, Lukashenka said that Belsat was hostile, but at lower levels, there was no enthusiasm to fight Belsat. Many years ago, I had such signals from a former Belarusian diplomat, who quietly told us to keep doing TV.
The regime’s approach to Belsat was inconsistent. Sometimes they repressed our people, and sometimes they let go. With a clear order from above, they were likely to attack us – the lower levels of the Lukashenka’s administration were mainly willing to fight us on their initiative.
On the other hand, the Lukashenka’s authorities were dismissive of us.
– But now, are they taking us seriously?
– Now they certainly do. Unfortunately. The number of sentences for our people can estimate this. They are trying to prosecute even people who used to work for us. Now it is serious.
– Well, that’s right, now we have a virtual ‘iron curtain’ with the East. And a war, which additionally puts Belarus on the other side. Belsat cannot operate any other way but underground. What will be the future of Belsat in these arch-difficult conditions?
– The fact is that it is not easy. But it is impossible to isolate us altogether in the Internet and social media age. However, we get information from there. Of course, we don’t use our correspondents because their work is too dangerous. We even banned those who stayed there and ordered they could not record anything, even by smartphones. For security reasons, I can’t tell you everything here. We have information from families, networks, social media, and so fort. I thought it would be worse, but we manage these guerrilla conditions.
The worst thing is with images and recordings. We take them from the archives; we make graphics. What is very important, I want us not to focus mainly or exclusively on Belarusian life outside Belarus. We now have a vast Belarusian diaspora. This diaspora is mostly intellectuals, the middle class. And to focus only on its affairs and life would be easy, but it would be a mistake. It is simple: go somewhere to follow Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and show the life of the diaspora. It is worth doing.
But you must be very careful to focus on Belarus all the time. Be there as much as possible. Although the mass of active people has left, quite a few remain. At the right moment, it will become clear how many are there. Lukashenka will be surprised. So will the diaspora.
– There is the topic of the war in Ukraine, which distracts attention from Belarus. On the other hand, since the border crisis and the Russian invasion, Belarus has been treated as an enemy. It’s harder to focus Polish attention on Belarusian issues.
– Yes, Belarus has a lousy reputation in Poland. For the most part, Polish people understand that not all Belarusians are like Lukashenka, and their attitude toward Lukashenka is naturally unsympathetic. But it is nevertheless an outstanding achievement, not only ours but of all Polish media, that Polish people distinguish between Belarus as a state and Belarusians.
If we do not expand our field of observation, we will not be able to keep the attention of viewers and readers from either Poland or the world on Belarus itself. I often warn our Belarusian employees not to look at their country as the navel of the world.
Now, from the Polish point of view, there is nothing more important than the situation in Ukraine andRussian aggression. Here the interest in the East is constant. Poland is better at this than the West.
– Do you imagine that Belsat will one day be a regular TV station in Belarus, one of many stations where politicians of different parties will come over to join the air time, and reporters will work business as usual without being prosecuted? Will Belsat even be needed in such Belarus?
– No one has yet seriously considered this. Although we sometimes dream about what will happen when we return to Minsk one day. There are two possibilities.
One is to do like Radio Liberty or the BBC, which in Poland, after the fall of communism, folded up in the 1990s. They decided that the mission was over. We can imagine a similar future for Belsat fulfilling the mission. And our services no longer be needed.
And the other version is a solution similar to private media, i.e., turning into a commercial station. We have ample opportunities on a different basis than now and a large, experienced staff. I also imagine such a future for Belsat as a commercial station with shareholders, perhaps also state-owned. A free Belarus will need free media. Belsat will be a source of employees – journalists for new media. Will there be such a will in Poland to develop it further? That would even be interesting.
Interview by Michał Kacewicz and Piotr Pogorzelski/belsat.eu
