Belarus has been a dictatorship since 1994, when Alexander Lukashenko was elected president. “Dictatorships don’t like journalists,” Khalip said in her acceptance speech last week. “They either destroy them or buy them out.” In 2003, Lukashenko altered the criminal code, making it illegal for journalists to write anything negative about the president.A witness to and a victim of government oppression, Khalip has been beaten and interrogated, and has endured multiple arrests. Police have searched her house, confiscated her computer and deleted her hard drive. Others have suffered worse. “We lost many people who were killed, abducted, who emigrated, who lost their jobs, who lost their fight because of fear,” Khalip told findingDulcinea. Still, she remains dedicated to her work“My friends such as Zinaida Gonchar, and Irina Krasovskaya lost their husbands. Their husbands [Victor Gonchar and Anatoly Krasovsky] were opponents of Lukoshenko's regime and they disappeared. They were killed.”Khalip, whose husband Andrei Sannikov, is also an opposition leader, explains that she can't stop reporting on civil and human rights abuses: “I will betray my friends. I will betray the memory of their husbands. There is only one way to go ahead.”Many other reporters chose differently. According to Khalip’s acceptance speech, many of her colleagues either emigrated or wrote propaganda. But she does not blame them for yielding to government pressure. “When they say, ‘I have no choice, I must bring money to feed my children,’ What can I say? Nothing.” Still, she adds, “Propaganda is not journalism.”