A burly female border guard blocks the entrance to the train carriage. “What? No Belarusian health insurance?“ she thunders and makes the distinct impression that she has no intention of granting this careless traveler access to “Europe’s last dictatorship”. It’s a first taste of state chicanery. The good lady decides to turn a blind eye this time, but instructs me to buy health cover as soon as we reach the station in Minsk.

I’m on the way into the land of Alexander Lukashenko, to prepare a workshop in Internet journalism for DW-AKADEMIE. It is our first seminar in the country after an absence of many years, made possible by a tentative opening up to the west by the powers that be in Minsk. What am I expecting? Gray buildings, gray people. An oppressive, depressing atmosphere. The atmosphere of a dictatorship – with images of the great leader on every street corner.

Instead, I come across the main artery through Minsk, the Prospekt Nezavisimosti, with its Stalin-era wedding-cake architecture. The sand-colored headquarters of the notorious KGB, yet to be renamed in this country, are impressive but not necessarily terrifying. The rooftop tower offers guards a good view of the streets below – or the nearby Dynamo stadium.

Shiny Dictatorship

Even the monumental Palace of the Republic appears almost beautiful. There’s a good opera house here – and the ballet company is reputedly better than Moscow’s. The streets are squeaky clean, the buildings free of graffiti and people go about their business in an orderly fashion. Hailing from Bavaria, I can’t help being reminded of Munich.

The Soviets laid all the blame on Germany for the complete destruction of the city in the Second World War. It’s no doubt largely true. “But Stalin leveled what was left of Minsk to fulfill his vision of the ideal Socialist city”, a journalist friend of mine told me while showing me around the city. In the meantime, a couple of old town districts have been rebuilt to old plans. The old town hall has also been restored but it looks incongruously new.

But let’s get back to the subject at hand – the workshop. The Internet has brought journalists in Belarus some new freedoms so our seminar will focus on journalism for the Web. But whom should we invite? So-called opposition journalists only? Or should we also invite editors and reporters who work for the state media?

Resigned to Our Fate or Ready to Work?

We opt for dialogue and decide to invite people from both sides to the seminar. The venue is ideal: the “Johannes Rau“ International Education and Exchange Center (IBB) in Minsk is a German-Belarusian joint project which aims to overcome borders – including the internal borders between the opposition and representatives of the state.

Everything goes to plan and, thanks to the help of our partners at the IBB, we all get our entry visas for the workshop and some interesting candidates apply to take part. Nevertheless, I am still a bit nervous on the first day of the seminar in early October. How will the participants react to each other? Will genuine dialogue even be possible?

My worries soon fade, as the people in the group quickly get over their mutual reservations. In the end, our discussion about freedom of the press in the country is brought to an end by someone from a Belarusian human rights organization: “Let’s just concentrate on the actual journalistic content!“ It sounds like she’s resigned to her fate, along the lines of “talking about it won’t change anything”.

Okay. So we get to work on journalistic content, starting with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Soundcloud. Some of the participants are already pretty Internet-savvy – telephony programs such as Skype or ICQ are very popular here, because they are harder for the secret services to eavesdrop on. But for other members of the groups, this is uncharted territory.

Amor and the Demolition Ball

Due to this imbalance, myself and my colleague Guy Degen decide to take radical action. We throw out our original plan altogether and decide to turn the seminar into a newsroom for the second week, with participants working independently on an audiovisual Web special. This allows us to address the participants’ individual needs.

The suggested topics are a far cry from hard-hitting journalism: they include women drivers, a statue of Amor somewhere in the country, and Belarus’ entry for the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. The most courageous proposal is a report on the brazen demolition of historic buildings. But it would be harsh to blame the participants in a country where a newspaper can receive a warning from the government just for using the ‘wrong’ font size.

After two weeks of hard work we finally reach our goal. The projects, including videos, photo galleries with audio soundtracks and interactive maps are all ready to go online. “I never would have thought I’d manage it “, said one participant, who hadn’t had much experience of computers beforehand. Admiring her special report on how the dead are commemorated in Belarus, she exclaims “I can build a Web site!”

In the end, the participants can at least agree on one thing: “You must come back again. And we want to take part the next time, too!“ No problem. But I’ll be taking my health insurance out beforehand next time. I can get it at the airport, for four Euros a week.

The project was supported by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Foreign Office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation for Belarus.