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Culture ministry prohibits people from putting up memorial signs in Kurapaty without its permission

 

The culture ministry has prohibited people from putting up any memorial signs in Kurapaty, a Stalin-era massacre site just outside Minsk, without its permission.

The ban is a setback for civil society activists planning to unveil a memorial sign to commemorate the Polish army officers who were executed by Stalin’s secret police NKVD.

“The culture ministry said that the unveiling of the sign would constitute a violation of regulations unless it was approved by the National Academy of Sciences and permitted by the ministry,” historian Ihar Kuznyatsow told BelaPAN. “In the past, authorities didn’t mind people unveiling memorial crosses and other signs in Kurapaty. Now it turns out that all of them are illegal.”

Mr. Kuznyatsow said that civil society activists would apply to the culture ministry for permission to put up the sign. “However, as the only Belarusian historian who has professional credentials to speak about Stalinist terror, I don’t know who will consider the application,” he said. “No one in the History Institute of the National Academy of Sciences studies this subject.”

When asked by a Polish journalist on January 15 about the possibility of excavating Kurapaty to find the remains of Polish soldiers, Alyaksandr Lukashenka reiterated that no Polish army officers had been executed by the NKVD in Belarus.

"Pay money if something is of interest to you," Mr. Lukashenka replied. "Poles are no strangers to us. Pay money, we will carry out excavations where you find necessary and answer your question."

Mr. Lukashenka said that Polish experts would not be allowed to dig up mass graves in Kurapaty. "We don’t go to your country to do digging and you should not come to our country," he said. However, he said, Polish reporters are welcome to provide coverage of such excavations.

While speaking at a news conference in Minsk in December 2011, Mr. Lukashenka claimed that after studying the country’s entire archival records, authorities concluded that not a single Pole had been executed in the territory of Belarus in 1939 and 1940