Editor jailed over Muhammad cartoons
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2366
The Minsk City Court in Belarus today imprisoned Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, an editor at the now-shuttered independent weekly Zgoda (Consensus) newspaper, for reprinting controversial Danish cartoons of the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1110 Muhammad in 2006. Sdvizhkov was charged with “incitement of religious hatred” and sentenced to three years in a high-security prison.
Sdvizhkov was arrested on November 18 and his trial began on January 11 in Minsk, according to local news reports. He was tried behind closed doors.
“Clearly this is just a pretext to punish an independent journalist even after shutting down his publication,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “We call on the Belarusian authorities to immediately release Aleksandr Sdvizhkov.”Aleksei Korol, Zgoda’s former editor-in-chief, told CPJ he was shocked by the sentence given to his former colleague. “The court ruling is disproportionate to his http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1760 community at the time.
http://www.cpj.org/news/2008/europe/belarus18jan08na.html
While the jailing of Sdvizhkov for reprinting the Muhammad cartoons is to be condemned, the “international community” is using the situation as a stick with which to beat Belarus, long a target because of close links with Russia. The http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2405 journalists, historians and dissidents for questioning official orthodoxy.
The small Muslim population of Belarus descends from the Tatar hordes which overran Eastern Europe repeatedly.