Police in Smalyavichy detain group of journalists to prevent them from attending public meeting with member of local district council
A group of journalists were briefly detained by police in
Smyalyavichy, Minsk region, on December 24 after they came to the city
to attend a public meeting with Yahor Lebyadok, a member of the
Smalyavichy District Soviet (Council).
Syarhey Vaznyak,
Mikalay Petrushenka, Vyachaslaw Pyashko, Syarhey Kruchkow and Lola
Buryyeva, who are members of the Belarusian Association of Journalists,
were arrested at Smalyavichy’s culture club at about 11 a.m., 10 minutes
before the meeting began. Police Lieutenant Colonel Andrey Martysyuk
and two other uniformed police officers took away their passports and
ordered the five journalists to go with them to the Smalyavichy district
police department for “identification purposes.”
As Mr. Vaznyak
told BelaPAN, he spent more than two hours at the police department. He
was ordered to provide a written account of the purpose of his visit to
Smalyavichy. Police officers took away a video camera and data storage
devices from Ms. Buryyeva for “examination” and returned them a few
hours later.
Mr. Lebyadok came to the police department after
the meeting and talked to the journalists. “He promised to make an
inquiry to the police department about the reason for the detention of
the journalists,” Mr. Vaznyak said, adding that the Belarusian
Association of Journalists would officially ask Mr. Lebyadok to find out
why the Smalyavichy police prevented the journalists from performing
their professional duties.
During the meeting, the journalists
were expected to raise the issue of the planned construction of the
Chinese-Belarusian Industrial Park in the Smalyavichy district, whose
residents are unhappy with the project.
An agreement on the
establishment of the Chinese-Belarusian Industrial Park was signed in
Minsk in September 2011 and ratified by the Belarusian parliament in
December 2011. Specific construction work to build facilities in the
area is expected to begin in the spring of 2013.
Under
Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s edict, the park is to occupy a total area of
8,048 hectares (19,890 acres) and have the status of a “special economic
zone” where resident companies will be granted special treatment for 50
years for the purpose of “securing comfortable conditions of doing
business and investment attractiveness.”
Residence in the Park
will be limited to Belarusian-registered legal entities that would
specialize in electronics, fine chemistry, biotechnologies,
machine-building and the development of new materials. Each company will
be required at to invest at least $5 million.
"Strategic
investors" will be granted the same concessions as companies in Belarus’
Free Economic Zones, High-Technology Park and small and medium-sized
cities.
Mr. Lukashenka said in December 2011 that Chinese
companies would invest dozens of billions of dollars in the Park, whose
scale he said was unprecedented even for China. "The most
state-of-the-art enterprises will be started," he said. "Companies from
all over the world will be involved."
Industrial Park Development
Company (IPDC) was founded in August to build and manage the Park’s
facilities. The founders include China's CAMC Engineering Co., Ltd.
(CAMCE), which owns 60 percent of the company, and the Minsk Regional
Executive Committee and Minsk-based television manufacturer Horizont,
which hold 30 and 10 percent, respectively.