British Correspondent Banned in Belarus
Jonathan Rugman, a foreign affairs correspondent for the British Channel 4 News, was denied entry to Belarus, as he wrote in his Twitter when sharing his report about Belarus Undercover in Europe's Last Dictatorship.
"Something wrong with your passport," the guards kept saying in between frantic phone calls to some unseen controller, before putting me on the next train back to Vilnius,” writes Mr Rugman in an article going together with the movie which still was produced “against the odds”.
I had applied for and been granted a multiple entry working visa to "Europe’s last dictatorship" but after my first visit in March I received an email from the Belarus embassy in London telling me the visa had been cancelled.
When the British Embassy in Minsk asked the foreign ministry why, the reply came back that it is "not within our competence to discuss this matter".
Jonathan Rugman, photo of channel4.com
“I was accredited as a correspondent for this event. I had even gone to Minsk and met the tournament's organisers, toured the brand new hockey stadium and discussed the intricacies of the game with the manager of the national team.
But, as it turned out, Mr Lukashenko's words were meaningless: my letter of accreditation was dismissed by the Belarusian border guards. I was now banned and nobody in this dictatorship needed to tell me why.
In a comment to the press service of BAJ, the spokesperson of the State Border Committee Aliaksandr Tsishchanka said that Jonathan Rugman tried to enter the country coming from Lithuania, via Gudogai border point, on May 7.
“I checked everything what happened there... He didn't have a valid visa, he was not in the accreditation data bases which is provided by the directory (of the IHWC); he neither had a ticket for the championship. For to be allowed to enter the country without a visa, you should have either a ticket or accreditation. So there were no any documented grounds to let him in. It is unclear what this man counted on... Why is all the information going to surface only now? I read that his twits are being published... As far as I understand he made the trick to promote his program. It should have been a PR trick.”
Note: For the time of the Ice Hockey World Championship, around 300 journalists were accredited for the event by organizers of the event. As for the rest, they could enjoy a relative freedom of movement having a ticket for a hockey match which allowed a one-per-ticket visa-free visit to Belarus.