Belarus adds NGO from Poland to list of “extremist” organisations for first time

Belarus has for the first time added an NGO from Poland to its list of “extremist” organisations. The foundation’s leadership could in theory face long-term sentences in Belarusian penal colonies.

Viasna, a Belarusian human rights organisation, first reported on Monday that the Freedom and Democracy Foundation (Fundacja Wolność i Demokracja), a Polish NGO, had earlier this month been added to the Belarusian interior minister’s list of “extremist formations”.

❗️MIA of Belarus included the Polish non-governmental @FundacjaWiD in the list of „extremist formations”.
The Foundation supports the struggle for #humanrights, civil liberties and freedom of speech in #Belarus and other post-Soviet countries.
👉https://t.co/dNVEMYPPQY pic.twitter.com/JJ2odwfzrE

— #FreeViasna (@FreeViasna) August 26, 2024

The foundation was established in 2006 after the closure by the Belarusian authorities of two independent Polish periodicals linked to the Union of Poles in Belarus. It focuses on “helping Poles in the East and supporting democratic changes in the territories of the former Soviet Union”, according to the foundation’s website.

Many former Soviet states have significant ethnic Polish minorities. Belarus is home to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles, who have faced growing persecution in recent years, including the detention and imprisonment of some of their leaders.

The Freedom and Democracy Foundation has been involved in supporting Polish-language media in Belarus and Ukraine as well as Belsat, a Poland-based Belarusian channel that offers reporting not found in Belarus’s own strictly controlled media.

One of the foundation’s websites, Kresy24, says that it has “for 18 years been providing assistance to people repressed by the regime” of President Alexander Lukashenko.

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Kresy24, which is aimed at Poles in former Soviet states, reports that the decision to add the foundation to the “extremist” list was probably made at the request of Belarus’s KGB intelligence agency.

It notes that the chair and deputy chair of the foundation’s board, Lilia Luboniewicz and Maciej Krzysztof Dancewicz, have also personally been added to the list. Under Belarusian law, such people face up to seven years in a penal colony, reports Polish news website Gazeta.pl.

Kresy24 also notes that the Freedom and Democracy Foundation has recently faced political pressure in Poland itself, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently named it among the NGOs that he claimed received potentially unlawful funding under the former Law and Justice (PiS) government.

According to broadcaster Radio Zet, the foundation received almost 60 million zloty (€14 million) from PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s chancellery between 2020-2023. At that time, Michał Dworczyk – who established the foundation in 2006 – was Morawiecki’s chief of staff and a government minister.

Around 100bn zloty (€23bn) of spending by the former PiS government has been identified as raising “suspicion it was spent illegally”, says @donaldtusk.

He accused the former ruling party of using state funds “for its own political and financial benefit” https://t.co/YQVVd8GBRW

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) August 9, 2024

Last year, Andrzej Poczobut – a journalist and leading figure in Belarus’s ethnic Polish community – was sentenced to eight years in prison for “inciting hatred” and “the rehabilitation of Nazism”.

His detention has been criticised by both the Polish and EU authorities, with Poland imposing sanctions against hundreds of Belarusian individuals in response, including one of Lukashenko’s sons.

Tensions between Warsaw and Minsk have also been increased in recent years by a migration crisis on the border engineered by the Belarusian authorities and condemned as a “hybrid attack” by Poland and the EU.

Poland has threatened to choke off Chinese freight transport to Europe via Belarus as a way of encouraging Beijing to pressure Minsk to curtail the migration crisis it has engineered on the Polish border, reports Bloomberg https://t.co/vaB04IQcOR

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 24, 2024

Main image credit: Kremlin/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY 4.0)

Agata Pyka is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a journalist and a political communication student at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in Polish and European politics as well as investigative journalism and has previously written for Euractiv and The European Correspondent.