Minsk: Diplomats lay flowers at Stalin-era mass grave site, pro-Lukashenka journos impede
On October 29, Western diplomats came to Kurapaty, a place on the outskirts of Minsk, and laid flower tributes to the victims of Stalinist repressions. Employees of pro-Lukashenka TV stations Belarus 1, ONT, STV unexpectedly arrived at the scene and started to act in a rather off-hand way, aiming to thwart the memorial event.
The Kurapaty forest turned to be a place of execution and a mass grave in 1937-1941. According to historians, 100,000 – 250,000 persons might have been killed there.
It should also be noted that Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions is to be commemorated tomorrow, on October 30. What is more, on 29-30 October 1937, Stalin’s secret police (NKVD) killed more than 100 representatives of Belarusian national elite in the present-day KGB prison. Belarusian poets, writers, scientists were killed one by one without remorse. Until the year of 2021, a memorial event known as The Night Of Executed Poets was staged in Kurapaty on October 29, the unofficial day of remembrance of the Soviet repressions in Belarus. This year, it will take place in many corners of the world, but not in Belarus, as the authorities will apparently be persecuting the participants in any ‘dissident’ activity.
And traditionally, Belarusians mark the Day of All Souls (Dzyady) on November 2.
“Ahead of Dzyady, the Remembrance of Ancestors Day, in keeping with the tradition, Minsk-based EU, UK, US and Swiss diplomats visited Kurapaty to commemorate the countless lives and immeasurable talent lost to the scourge of totalitarianism. The people’s memorial is a tribute also to those Belarusians who have worked bravely and persistently for decades to see to it that there will be no more roads to death in their nation’s history,” the press service of the EU Delegation to Belarus said on Facebook on Friday.
During the mourning action, employees of state-controlled TV channels made attempts to distract the foreign diplomats, posing numerous about the fourth sanctions package, extradition of ‘Lithuanian Nazis’, a monument to Stepan Bandera in Ukraine. The diplomats tried to contact the spokesman of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but in vain.
One of the pro-government journalists got out of line, mockingly and loudly asking in the course of a minute of silence: “Well, let’s start a press conference. Can you answer our questions now?”
A bit later, the same woman wrote on Telegram channel that it was NKVD officers and red commanders who were buried in Kurapaty. Another state media worker says that he is satisfied with the social media storm that their behaviour has triggered in the Belarusian segment of the Internet.
Representatives of diplomatic missions often visit sites of commemoration – Kurapaty, Trastyanets, the Pit memorial in downtown Minsk, and others. Until today, the state media have not been spotted in seeking to disrupt such events.
