Belarus: 3 Years Hard-Labor For Printing Mohammad Cartoons

This is pretty strange. A newspaper editor was convicted of "inciting religious hatred" after reprinting the infamous Mohammad Cartoons, and sent to the Gulag for three years.

MINSK, Belarus - A Belarus court sentenced a newspaper editor Friday to three years in prison for reprinting a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked worldwide riots when it was initially published in a Danish newspaper.

In Vienna, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe protested the sentence and called for the release of Alexander Sdvizhkov, the former deputy editor of the small-circulation Zhoda newspaper.

Security officers in Belarus launched an investigation of Sdvizhkov in February 2006 when he published the caricatures which had originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Fiery protests swept across Muslim countries in early 2006 in reaction to the Danish publication.

President Alexander Lukashenko ordered the paper shut the following month, calling the publication of the cartoon "a provocation against the state." Sdvizhkov was arrested and charged with "inciting religious hatred" in November 2007 when he returned to Belarus following several months of living in Russia and Ukraine.

Belarus is ruled my a world-class jackass, but they have an extremely small Muslim population, and a very devout Orthodox majority. Lukashenko undoubtedly has some other beef with the editor. We are talking about a guy that admitted that his elections were rigged, compared himself to Hitler, was quoted saying that anybody joining an opposition protest would be labeled a terrorist, and they (the ruling party) would "...wring their necks, as one might a duck".