Belarus leader speaks out on Clinton’s gift and restaurant near Stalin-era mass grave


Alyaksandr Lukashenka has slammed ‘those demonstrating with crosses’ in Kurapaty during The Big Conversation With President on March, 1.

Since May 2018, the group of Belarusian activists is protesting against ‘dancing on the bones’, i.e.the activity of Let’s Go And Eat restaurant in the vicinity of the Stalin-era mass grave in Kurapaty near Minsk under the passive eye of the local authorities. According to the protesters, its construction and opening at the very place was illegal. Activists first asked the authorities to interfere with the situation, and then decided to act independently. They are trying not to let cars to the territory of the restaurant. The Minsk police have already drawn dozens of protocols against activists who had blocked the restaurant that opened at the site of the massacre.

“The restaurant will continue working. There are no grounds to close it down, people need to eat out, this is normal,” the Belarusian leader said on Friday.

He promised that there would never be sort of Stalinism in Belarus, even ‘under the dictatorship of Lukashenka’.

“But this does not mean that one should pin everything on Stalinism. For example, people were killed there in Stalin’s times. But are you sure that Nazis did not shoot people in Kurapaty? Not absolutely?

Thus, let’s be unbiased. Ah, Clinton arrived [in Belarus], he was sitting on the bench and that is why our opposition believes the bench to be a relic. Someone destroyed it; I immediately ordered to restore it to prevent peddling rumours about the [Belarusian] authorities’ hand in it. The authorities have nothing to do with it!”

On February 1, unknown individuals demolished the bench presented by Bill Clinton who visited Kurapaty in 1994. It has been vandalized about 20 times, but the Belarusian authorities have never traced any committers.

News
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2019.02.28 10:43

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