As Poland supports the pro-democracy opposition in Belarus, Polish-Belarusian relations are poor, and representatives of the Polish minority in Belarus often complain about various repressions, such as the jailing for 15 days, of the former head of the Union of Poles, Tadeusz Gawin. He was sentenced on 2 August 2005 for arranging a meeting between a visiting deputy speaker of the Polish parliament, Donald Tusk, and the ethnic Polish activists including Veslaw Kewlyak, also sentenced for 15 days. The Lukashenko government launched a campaign against the Polish ethnic minority claiming that they were trying to destabilise the balance of power, and that the Polish minority is a fifth column (see, earlier Soviet proclamations). In May and June of that year a Polish diplomat was expelled, a Polish-language newspaper was closed and the democratically elected leadership of a local Polish organisation, the Union of Poles in Belarus (UPB), had their own nominees forcibly replaced by those sympathetic to Lukashenko.