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Conservative Christian Party stages commemorative procession to Stalin-era massacre site

 

Some 70 people, mostly members of the Conservative Christian Party (CCP), took part in an annual commemorative procession staged Sunday in Minsk to honor the memory of the victims of Stalinist terror on the occasion of Dzyady (Remembrance of Ancestors Day).

The procession, organized by the CCP and sanctioned by the Minsk city government, ran from the Loshytsa Culture Palace on Mayakowskaha Street to Loshytsa Park, a Stalin-era massacre site.

Participants displayed Belarus’ historically national white-red-white flags, CCP banners and signs saying “Dzyady” and “Belarusian Solidarity against Russian Occupation, chanting “Zhyve Belarus!” (Long Live Belarus!) and singing patriotic songs.

The procession, which was accompanied by plainclothesmen, with some of them filming the event on video cameras, ended with a flower-laying ceremony in Loshytsa Park.

CCP Executive Secretary Valery Buyval read out an address by Zyanon Paznyak, in which the emigre CCP leader emphasized the sacred importance of Dzyady for Belarusians and called on the Belarusian people to fight for their national values, including the mother tongue.

CCP Deputy Chairman Yury Belenki expressed hope that Belarusians would have enough inner strength to defend their home country. This can be done through “preserving love for the Belarusian language and culture in our souls,” he said.
At the end of the ceremony, participants sang together "Mahutny Bozha" (Oh, Lord Almighty), a Belarusian-language religious anthem.

A man was arrested by plainclothesmen at a public bus stop following the ceremony for apparently wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogans “For Belarus without Dictatorship” and “For Belarus without Lukashenka.”

As Mr. Belenki told BelaPAN, at the beginning of the procession, he advised the man to take off the T-shirt, but the man, who identified himself as Leanid Smowzh, a resident of Stowbtsy, Minsk region, refused, saying that he was thus expressing his opinion.

Loshytsa Park is one of the nine known sites in and near Minsk where people were executed and buried by the NKVD in the 1930s and the early 1940s.

Mr. Paznyak, formerly a historian and archeologist, claims that up to 10,000 people were executed and buried at the site in the 1930s.

In the late 1980s, Soviet authorities filled up the ravine where people had been shot and garages were built there.

A five-meter high wooden cross bearing the inscription “To the Victims of Bolshevik Terror” was erected in the area in 1995 by civil society activists on the initiative of the Belarusian Popular Front. //BelaPAN