Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 5 – Many in Belarus
and the West recently had developed a more positive attitude toward Alyaksandr
Lukashenka because of his opposition to Vladimir Putin’s obvious push to absorb
Belarus into Russia; but whatever credit he had gained in Belarus or the West,
he lost yesterday when he ordered his goons to destroy the crosses at Kuropaty.
The Belarusian powers that be – and it
has never been more appropriate to call them that than to label them “the
authorities” – destroyed dozens of crosses at Kuropaty, the site of mass graves
from Stalin’s time whose discovery by Zenon Paznyak in the late 1980s played a
key role in the rise of the modern Belarusian national movement.
The goons claimed the crosses had
been erected illegally and they then proceeded to arrest more than a dozen of
200 Belarusians who staged a march through the memorial to the victimization of
the Belarusian people by the Soviet system, a memorial Lukashenka has never visited
(charter97.org/ru/news/2019/4/4/329408/)
and sought to close down but had never taken such thuggish actions against (charter97.org/ru/news/2019/4/5/329456/).
The destruction of the crosses, the
arrests of peaceful demonstrators and the transparency of Lukashenka’s desire
to wipe out any memory of what Moscow did to his people in pursuit of some
improve relationship with Putin outraged Belarusians, Western diplomats and democratic
governments around the world (charter97.org/ru/news/2019/4/4/329415/, charter97.org/ru/news/2019/4/4/329394/, charter97.org/ru/news/2019/4/5/329427/ and
As one Belarusian writer put it, “the
path to a free Belarus lies through the condemnation of the crimes which were committed
by communism and through repentance to our fathers and grandfathers. All such
criminals must be condemned because they committed a genocide against the
Belarusian people” (charter97.org/ru/news/2019/4/5/329456/).
But instead of honoring the memory
of the dead and condemning those who killed them, Lukashenka has now tried to
white out the memory and thus let the mass murderers off the hook, a crime that
Belarusian Nobelist Svetlana Alexievich says she did not think even Lukashenka
was capable of (news.tut.by/economics/632646.html).
According to Paznyak, who first called
attention to the mass graves at Kuropaty, Lukashenka’s actions are “the beginning
of a war,” one in which the Belarusian people are entering the final battle
with the Belarusian dictator in the name of their past and their rights (belaruspartisan.by/politic/459588/).
That divide between the people and
the power in Belarus is all the deeper because on the same day that Lukashenka
destroyed the crosses over the mass graves of Belarusian victims of Stalin, his
regime ordered the renaming of a street in a Belarusian city: It will no longer
bear the name of a Belarusian writer; instead, it will feature a Soviet chekist
(reform.by/ulicu-adama-mickevicha-v-rechice-pereimenovali-v-chest-chekista/).
The Putin regime couldn’t be more
pleased. Not only has Lukashenka behaved in ways exactly equivalent to the ones
it has used, but he is now so isolated at home and abroad that he will have
little choice but to do what the Kremlin wants. Some in the West can be counted
on to say that he must be given support because he may be a bastard but he
could be ours.
But there are some actions that put
even members of that category beyond the pale, and this is one of them.
Lukashenka will now be remembered not as someone who played the Russians and
the West to save his country but as someone who sought to destroy his nation’s
memory in the name of whitewashing its murderers.
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