Minsk residents, foreign diplomats commemorate Stalin terror victims :: Charter'97 :: News

About 250 people, mostly activists of Belarus` opposition Conservative Christian Party (CCP), gathered near the entrance into the Park Chelyuskintsev subway station in Minsk at 11 a.m. on October 30 to take part in a traditional march on the occasion of Dzyady (ancestors` remembrance day) observed in Belarus on November 2.

The crowd headed for Kurapaty, the woody place just outside Minsk where thousands were executed and buried by Josef Stalin`s secret police in the 1930s and at the beginning of the 1940s. While marching in a procession along Minsk`s main thoroughfare, Fransicak Skaryna Avenue, people displayed white-red-white flags and banners reading, "Let`s Commemorate Kurapaty Victims!" "No to Union with Russian Empire!" and others.

Joined by some 50 more people at Kurapaty, the gathering put up wooden crosses and laid flowers at graves and attended a "prayer for Belarus."

Speakers at the rally severely criticized policies of neighboring Russia toward Belarus and towards its own peoples. "The Belarusians do not want to form a union with the imperialistic and criminal Russia. They want to live in a normal European country called Belarus. We are not against the Russian people, we are against the Russian imperialism`s criminal ideology," stressed Yury Belenky, CCP deputy chairman. He said that the party is forming a group to spearhead preparations for the 2006 presidential election.

The organizers used a mouthpiece to address the gathering because police had seized their amplifiers and speakers.

The ambassadors of European Union countries and the United States paid tribute to the Kurapaty massacre victims on the previous day.

Aleksandr Milinkevich, an opposition hopeful in Belarus` 2006 presidential election, also visited the graves on Sunday morning.