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Belarus Internal Security
As with many other Belarusian institutions, the
internal
security forces were inherited more or less intact when
the
Soviet Union was dissolved, and the name of the country's
security service remains the KGB. The local assets of
these
institutions were transferred to the new government and
continued
functioning with basically the same policies and, very
often, the
same personnel.
The former communist, pro-Russian hard-liners still in
charge
of many of Belarus's institutions are determined to stay
in
power. One of their methods is censorship. They call
newspaper
editors in for "chats" about government policy and the
subsidies
that keep many periodicals afloat. They also enforced the
media
restrictions on coverage of the May 1995 parliamentary
elections,
which kept newspapers from publishing interviews with the
candidates and stories about the campaign in general.
Data as of June 1995
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