Vclav Havel Fellowship programme helps young journalists from post-Soviet bloc states

The Vaclav Havel Journalism Fellowship was founded in 2011 by the Czech Foreign Ministry, Radio Free Europe and Vize 97 -the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Foundation, with the aim of advancing and promoting media freedom in the post-communist world. Fellows are selected from the RFEs broadcast region where media freedom is stifled and independent journalists often work at risk. The selected journalists spend several months at RFE where they receive on-the-job training from seasoned professionals.

Vclav Havel, photo: Tom Adamec, Ro This years fellowship programme has brought together young journalists from Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. When they visited Czech Radio this week I asked some of them about the media scene in their homeland and the problems they face in their daily work.

Olga Malchevska is from Ukraine:

Journalists had a difficult time in Ukraine under president Yanukovych because we didnt have freedom of speech and every time it was a struggle for me as a journalist to make people understand what was propaganda and what was the truth. It was a really, really challenging situation. Then the situation changed rapidly and now we dont have such problems i.e. attempts to suppress the media- but we have a different problem. We are at war with the Russian Federation and that is also very difficult. First, it is difficult to cover the situation physically because Ukrainian journalists are not allowed into Eastern Ukraine and secondly, it is very hard to fight propaganda. We are journalists and our job is to tell the truth just to tell the truth not to fight propaganda, but we face a huge propaganda blitz from the Russian media and this propaganda is in the brains of people who do not have any other source of information than the Russian media and that is what is happening in Eastern Ukraine right now. They dont get information from the Ukrainian media or independent foreign media they only have information from the Russian media and that is why they do not have a choice, they do not have the ability to figure out what is going on. And now we are facing a situation where we see with our own eyes how the media can cause a war in a country. It is something I would not have imagined possible. But as a Ukrainian journalist I am trying no, I am not trying I AM telling the truth.

Evgeny Kuzmin is a journalist based in the far-east Amur region of the Russian Federation. He entered the media scene when the country was ruled by president Boris Yeltsin and says that much has changed in the past decade. The problem is, of course, very complex. The first is pressure that has been tightening and tightening now for over a decade. And in the wake of what happened in Ukraine it became almost total. Only a few independent voices remain on the federal level. I think that the number of media outlets which have an independent voice and express independent opinions can be counted on the fingers of one hand or at the most two hands thats in the whole country and they are almost virtually non-existent in the regions, though there are some exceptions.

But, looking at the problem from another angle, there is no public demand for a free and independent press, so as I see it this is not just a problem created by the bad guys in power, but by the millions, tens of millions of people who do not require it they do not really need it, sometimes they do not want to listen to something that is the truth, but a bad truth. But of course it is the responsibility of those who are in the Kremlin to change that. They had 15 years to make society more thoughtful and more mature but they did not, it was not something they wanted to do.

Was it a difficult decision for you entering journalism when you knew you would be up against these problems and would be putting yourself and your family at risk?

As a journalist from the regions I didnt really face any threats I dont face them though maybe the situation would be different if I were to move to Moscow and work for some federal mediaWhen I entered the media scene in 2000-2001 the situation was different. It was just after president Yeltsin resigned and he was famous for being very liberal towards the media. That was when a lot of them emerged and I was pretty optimistic about the prospects - with the arrival of the Internet and everything, but now, if I had to make the choice again or, let us say, that if a young guy asked me whether to become a journalist or not I would probably say NO, do something else. There is not much room to do good journalism in my country and also which is shameful for me as a citizen there is no demand in the society for this journalism and that may be even worse.

Olga Malchevska from Ukraine says that even if she is ready to tell the truth the public is not always cooperative overcoming years of censorship is not easy.

One of the main difficulties is that we cannot change the mentality of people in a single year. Most people are still scared. They were scared during Yanukovychs time, they were scared to tell the truth, they were scared that they were giving an interview and somebody would call them and somebody would harm their children. Now they dont have such a president and such a government, but they are still scared because they cannot change their mentality in one year or one month. And that is why our job is difficult. We try to explain that nobody is going to suppress them, that we are trying to help. We tell them if people know about your problems then maybe those problems will be solved, we need to know about them so please be open, be open and then you will change your society and your life.