Belenki: Belarusians are pragmatic and need special moments for changes
The organizer for Dzyady-2014 has explained why few people attend allowed actions in Belarus and whether Belarusians are capable of being active.
Much fewer people have attended this year’s Dzyady. Up to 1000 people took part in the manifestation, organizer Yury Belenki said. Ales Mazanik, the leader for the column, counted 500 people and some other people – only a few hundreds.
Zyanon Paznyak’s appeal was read out during the memorial meeting in Kurapaty tract. BPF Party representatives called him ‘the leader of the Belarusian nation’.
The leader of the Belarusian opposition of the 1990s recalled all the people killed in Kurapaty.
“All the victims are a result of the war with the barbarian east,” Zyanon Paznyak wrote. “The war continues now – the language, village life and national culture are being destroyed...”
Yury Belenki, Zyanon Paznyak’s deputy, also mentioned ‘the destruction of the Belarusian nation by Russian fascism’. He also gave it good and hard to Belarusian Metropolitan Pavel who is a Russian and who had promised the West ‘to turn on the Chernobyl tap’.
Yury Belenki was satisfied with Dzyady-2014 as the organizer. He explained that Belarusians were pragmatic and did not want to be filmed. That’s why few people came:
Yury Belenki: “People feel that it may result in problems, they need a special moment like on October 30 1988 (the first mass manifestation in Kurapaty when the police tried dispersing the meeting but failed. – Euroradio). People came to Independence Square in 1991, 100 thousand people supported us. We adopted a number of bills that helped build an independent state later.”
Kurapaty became known as a symbol of the Belarusian state sovereignty at the end of the 1980s. A lot of people were shot there during Stalin’s repressions. According to different sources, from 7 to a few hundred thousand people were killed there.
