World newspapers at their Dublin congress have rightly honoured some doughty campaigners for press freedom, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow.
A lavish ceremony in Dublin this week shed a little light on the plight of Belarus, an impoverished nation sandwiched between Poland and Russia and labouring under the heel of President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe's last dictator.
The World Newspaper Congress honoured Belarus's independent journalists with its Golden Pen of Freedom award, and caught a glimpse of life in one of the Continent's darkest corners.
"Mr Lukashenko has made his country one of the most dangerous on Earth to practise journalism," Ms Gloria Brown Anderson, president of the World Editors' Forum, told the meeting.
Ms Brown Anderson, a New York Times executive, said reporters in Belarus faced "unimaginable obstacles" and praised the Belarussian Association of Journalists and its leader, Ms Zhanna Litvina, for "fighting bravely against what is no doubt the most repressive regime in Europe."
For Ms Litvina and her colleagues, the Dublin ceremony offered brief respite from a system of repression that has closed dozens of independent newspapers and seen journalists beaten up and sent to hard-labour camps.
Yesterday a bus delivering copies of a Belarussian newspaper was stopped on the outskirts of the nation's capital, Minsk. Russia's NTV television said police searched the bus for drugs hidden among the newspapers. It was unclear whether the paper ever made it on to Belarussian newsstands, but its journey says much about the state of the media under Mr Lukashenko.
Journalists had printed the paper in the Russian town of Smolensk, because Mr Lukashenko's Information Minister had outlawed its publication in Belarus last month. The ban came after the newspaper reported allegations of an affair between Mr Lukashenko - a surly, moustachioed man who plasters his few strands of hair across an otherwise bald head - and a beauty queen. Articles on criminal investigations against former heads of state-owned enterprises also drew official ire.
The newspaper's writers tried to get around the ban by releasing it under a different name, but the presses were quickly stilled by "technical problems".
The Reporters Without Borders group called the forced closure "a new offensive in the government's flagrant harassment of the independent press . . . clearly aimed at silencing journalists who criticise President Lukashenko."
Washington also lambasted the closure this month. But it is just the latest such outburst from the West, and Mr Lukashenko, the Belarus leader since Soviet times, has paid little attention.
Reporters Without Borders says Belarussian officials have prevented five newspapers from publishing over the last six months, and last month the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists placed Belarus among the world's 10 worst places for journalists, along with conflict zones like Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya. It also protested at the fate of three journalists sentenced to terms of hard labour camps last year for criticising Mr Lukashenko.
Newspaper editor Nikolai Markevich and one of his journalists, Pavel Mazheiko, were convicted for criticising Mr Lukashenko, and Viktor Ivashkevich, editor of another paper, for publishing a story accusing him of corruption.
But critics of Mr Lukashenko's regime say jail is not the most severe punishment it metes out to critics. Belarus still bubbles with allegations implicating the President and his immediate circle in the disappearance in 1999 of several leading opposition figures.
And in July 2000 Dmitri Zavadski, a cameraman for Russian state television, disappeared without trace. Four men, including two former policemen, were convicted behind closed doors of his murder, but allegations of official collusion were never addressed.
Mr Zavadski's death did little for relations between Russia and Belarus, and they remain tense, despite Minsk's enthusiasm for talk of a potential union between the old Soviet states.
Belarus's stagnant, centralised economy has little to recommend it and would be a major drag on a Russian system that is desperate to maintain forward momentum.
Daniel McLaughlin is a correspondent in Moscow for 'The Irish Times'