Telia Sonera is a part-owner of the Turkish company Turkcell, which in turn owns 80% of telecommunications company Life in Belarus. 20% is owned by President Lukashenko himself.

Lukashenko is known for his tough methods where they for years have been imprisoning, beating, torturing and kidnapping oppositional politicians and independent journalists. The presidential election in December 2010 launched a nightmare of violence and persecution, which still is far from over.

-       The Belarusian regime is the last dictatorship in Europe, and it now lives up to the epithet even more, for its hard-line domestic policies which recently changed from being authoritarian to totalitarian. A very important tool in the regime’s efforts to protect power and keep the balance of repressions against its own people is the very extensive mass surveillance directly connected to the Belarusian secret service KGB, says Isabel Sommerfeld, coordinator of Info Belarus.

Through major wiretapping, surveillance and mass data storage the regime hunts down oppositional politicians and journalists. In the recent months, presidential candidates from the 2010 election has told about how the KGB have been torturing them and threatened to kill family members. In the trial against presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov it turned out that his phone calls were tapped during the entire election campaign, and that these recordings were used for judging Sannikov to five years in prison.

The regime has been tracking those who were at the square to protest against the electoral fraud in Minsk on December 19, by requesting a list of those, from among others the telephone network for which TeliaSonera is a part-owner . The monitoring and tracking systems, and the mass data storage Lukashenko uses are connected to TeliaSonera’s business in Belarus and the technological tools have free access to TeliaSonera’s network.

-       Through its partnership with Lukashenko TeliaSonera contributes to the regimes violation of human rights and freedom. It is not difficult to argue that TeliaSonera’s proud statements on safe and secure communications are not true for the people of Belarus. We demand that TeliaSonera immediately look over their business in the country. A company partly owned by the Swedish State and thereby the Swedish tax payers should not directly cooperate with regimes that govern by political persecution, threats, violence and torture, says Isabel Sommerfeld.

Thursday the 19th of May at 11:30 to 12:30 we will be holding a solidarity demonstration for human rights and freedom in Belarus at Sergels Torg in Stockholm. The demonstration is organized by Info Belarus in cooperation with SILC and Östgruppen. Meanwhile, an article of presidential candidate Ales Michalevich will be published on infobelarus.nu, where he tells about the presidential election and torture in the KGB prison. It is time to break the silence regarding the abuse and persecution in Belarus. We hope that TeliaSonera also will take responsibility and stop its support to the dictatorship.

For more information or questions, contact:

Isabel Sommerfeld, Coordinator of Info Belarus
infobelarus.sweden@gmail.com
+46(0)707 292 188

This year’ revolutions in the Arabic world wouldn’t have happened so fast without Internet used as a mean for coordination, public opinion changing and fast distribution of information.

Internet access is also a condition for investment attracting, hi-tech development and services market growth in such transforming countries as Belarus. Just economic reasons made Belarusian government taking off the obstacles for Internet spreading in the country.

In Belarus Internet was considered to be a luxury 10 years ago. Mainly students and it-workers were using it at that time.

It started to be more accessible but remained yet expensive 5 years ago. The rates on Internet in Belarus significantly exceeded (in 2-3 times) the prices in the neighboring countries (Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania). Furthermore Internet providing services were paid according to traffic (depending on how many Megabytes were transmitted by a client).  High price and by-traffic-rating hindered popularity of web-services in Belarus. Just a small percentage of state-owned and private businesses purchased permanent Internet access.  Office workers of the private sector joint students and IT-men on the Internet but people’s main source of information was still state TV at that time.

Radical change happened a couple of years ago when the Belarusian government liberalized the Internet market and the state Internet-provider Beltelecom set damping prices for Internet services, cheap and unlimited tariffs appeared. As a result auditorium of Belarus currently exceeds 3,5 million people (in 9.5 million country). Belarusians started not just check email and read text-news but also to upload and watch video, communicate through social networks. You can find almost all office workers, students, youth, self-occupied persons among Internet users in 2011.

Thus, the amount of Internet users in Belarus is sufficient enough for Internet to become an important factor of public opinion change and future political and social transformations within the society. The issue of choosing the strategy of using this huge resource is still vital for democratic forces in Belarus and EU being the main democratization factor in Belarus.

2. The events in Iran of 2009 gave a serious lesson to Lukashenkas regime and the Administration of the President as its core. Consequently legal regulation acts were issued to prepare a legal base for blocking of any of the oppositional websites within minutes, for total surveillance on citizens. 100% of Internet traffic started to be captured, stored and monitored legally in Belarus since this regulation was enforced. Personal identification of all people connecting to Internet (for instance visiting and Internet-café) is now also required.

In general those measures haven’t affected the activity and popularity of independent and oppositional websites but have become a time-bomb already ticking and threatening everybody not supporting Lukashenko.

A number of independent journalists and bloggers writing on the Internet have been tracked down by their IP-addresses and sent to prison. These criminal cases are used by the regime as pointing strikes to frighten hundreds of thousands of bloggers acting in Belarus.

3. Unfortunately, democratic forces of Belarus and independent media were not ready to such rapid growth of Internet users and to the restricting measures of the Lukashenko regime in this sphere.

Belarus faces the following development problems: the lack of democracy and liberal ideas, the exclusion of the youth from the social life and politics, poorly developed civil society. In the Belarusian Internet sector there are some factors aggravating the mentioned problems:

1) The Russian influence on Belarusian Internet-audience,

2) The loyalty of the entertaining web-services to current political regime in Belarus.

These factors increase the indifferent attitude of the young and progressive part of the society to democratic and liberal ideas, social life and politics.

There are two main tendencies in the sphere of Belarusian Internet mass media: 1) entertaining and specialized web-services have greater popularity then those of pure political news orientation; 2) social and multimedia resources play greater role. Popularity of multimedia is caused by desire of modern users to watch and hear instead of reading.

There are some independent Belarusian web resources, where visitors can receive information on events in Belarus, but there is an insufficient number of the projects which are designed to broadcast for many target groups, it covers various aspects of Belarus life, starting from news, politics and rallies and finishing with feature films with the Belarus subtitles, cartoons and humor. Such variable content makes it possible to attract a politically indifferent audience and inform it of the political and social issues with the help of multimedia.

The issue of training activists to act safely in the conditions of total tracking and surveillance is also required.

Sergey Varankevich

The head of the Belarusian Youth NGO ‘Civil Forum’
Editor of Open Directory Project (DMOZ)
Lawyer, web-master

Isabel Sommerfeld, samordnare för InfoBelarus, och Martin Källström, VD för Twingly.
Foto: Teo Zetterman/UD

I dag deltog Info Belarus samordnare Isabel Sommerfeld vid ett möte på Utrikesdepartementet med biståndsminister Gunilla Carlsson. Temat för dagen var hur nya kommunikations- och informationsverktyg kan användas i biståndet för att stärka frihet och demokrati i utvecklingsländer. Idéerna som uppkommit under diskussionen med 10 experter på området, nätaktivister samt biståndsministern, kommer att ingå i underlaget för att utveckla det svenska demokrati- och e-biståndet.

Här kan du läsa mer om mötet och Sveriges satsning på e-bistånd:
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/it_telekom/internet/article3123594.ece , http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/14184/a/162852 , http://www.dn.se/nyheter/politik/sverige-vill-satsa-mer-pa-natbistand , http://norran.se/nyheter/inrikes/article1142541.ece , http://www.aftonbladet.se/senastenytt/ttnyheter/inrikes/article8694620.ab , http://www.aftonbladet.se/debatt/article8686990.ab.

Här kan du se foton från mötet på UD:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/utrikesdepartementet/sets/72157626111996413/detail/

I och med den nya lagen kommer Internetleverantörer bli skyldiga att hålla register över sina kunder, vilken utrustning de använder samt vilka vilka Internetsidor de använder under minst ett års tid. Detta krav kommer även att ställas på Internet-caféer som i och med den nya lagen kommer att vara tvungna att kräva legitimation av sina kunder samt registrera dessa.

Myndigheterna får samtidigt befogenheter att stänga ner Internetsidor som de anser förmedlar ”olagligt innehåll”. Vad som räknas som ”olagligt innehåll” är väldigt otydligt i lagen men ”innehåll av extremistisk natur, som förespråkar användning av vapen och sprängmedel, droger och andra gifter, information som syftar till att främja illegal migration och trafficking, som uppmuntrar till våldsanvändning eller ”annan handling som är förbjuden enligt lag” ska vara giltiga skäl för att stänga ner en Internetsida.

Detta kan få förödande konsekvenser för icke-registrerade organisationer vars aktiviteter strider mot kriminallagstiftningen. Det ska även vara möjligt för vanliga Internetanvändare att begära att en Internetleverantör stänger ner sidor som man anser ha ”olagligt innehåll” för att, som lagen säger, skydda sig och sin familj. Detta kommer få konsekvensen att vi kommer att kunna se ett system av självkontroll där medborgarna kommer att uppmanas att anmäla de sidor som sägs strida mot lagen.

Detta ger myndigheterna en enorm makt när det kommer till att kontrollera Internet. Man har redan börjat tala om behovet av reglering av Internet på Belarusisk tv och då hänvisat till ”etiska och moraliska skäl”. Man menar även att man vill ”skydda landets barn från skadlig information” och har då ofta hänvisat till den ortodoxa kyrkan som länge varit kritisk till det som pågår på Internet.

Organisationen Reportrar utan gränser hävdar den nya lagen kommer att göra landet till ”Internets fiender” och mycket tyder på att det fria ordet och den personliga friheten ytterligare stramas åt.