Friday, April 5, 2019

Lukashenka has Lost Any Credit He had in Belarus or the West by Vandalizing Kuropaty


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.   

No comments:

Post a Comment