Belarus Generals Sacked over Swedish Teddy Bear Stunt

The president of Belarus has sacked his air force and border security chiefs because a Swedish plane managed to drop teddy bears into the country with signs calling for freedom of expression.

Two Belarus citizens were arrested in connection with the stunt, and charged with aiding “illegal migration” of the Swedish activists who crossed into Belarus.

Amnesty International’s Heather McGill says the two jailed Belarussians are not connected with the incident, which is taking place at a time when there is very little respect for human rights in Belarus.

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Aaron Schachter: I’m Aaron Schachter and this is “The World”. Imagine a thousand teddy bears dropping from the sky. That’s what happened a month ago when a Swedish ad agency parachuted bears into Belarus. The stuffed toys held signs calling for freedom of speech. It was a stunt to highlight repression in the country. Authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko was not amused. He fired two generals for letting the bear-carrying plane into Belarus airspace and two Belarusian citizens have been jailed. Heather McGill is with Amnesty International in London. She says respect for human rights is at an all time low in Belarus.

Heather McGill: This case of the teddy bears is really just the worst example to date. The worst thing about it is that the two men who’ve been charged aren’t actually activists that have any connection at all with the Swedes who flew across the border. Anton Suryapin is a journalist student, who simply received a photograph of the teddy bears and posted it on a website. And Sergei Basharimov is a man who works for a rental agency in Minsk, who happened to hand over keys to a flat to two Swedes, who were taking part in this stunt. And so these two people have now been charged with aiding illegal migration or assisting a group to illegally cross the border of Belarus and could face up to seven years imprisonment. So we’ve asked that charges against these two people should be dropped immediately and that they should be released.

Schachter: Now Lukashenko’s re-election in 2010 was marred by reports of abuses. This just seems more of the same, yeah?

McGill: Yes. It’s very much more of the same. But things have simply got worse since December 2010, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Minsk in a really amazing demonstration of lack of faith in the elections. And as a result of that, hundreds of people were detained. Then we’ve seen, for instance, last summer there was an explosion of silent protests around the country. But following that, the laws were tightened even more to prevent people from expressing their views in public and made it illegal for people to stand in groups in public doing nothing.

Schachter: And what do you think will be the consequences of this in international diplomacy? Do you think Belarus will demand that the Swedish government apologize?

McGill: I don’t know about that, but I certainly hope that in international diplomacy we give a very clear message that human rights violations and the clamp down on freedom of expression that we’re seeing in Belarus and Russia is not acceptable.

Schachter: Heather McGill of Amnesty International speaking to us from London. Thank you.

McGill: Thank you very much.

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