ANALYSIS: Kuropaty: a past that can't be expunged (08/12/01)

ANALYSIS

Kuropaty: a past that can't be expunged

by Paul Goble
RFE/RL Newsline

Vandals have destroyed a monument near Miensk to the victims of Stalin-era mass murders in Belarus, Belarusian People's Front official Vladimir Yukho said in late July.

The opposition activist suggested that this action appears to represent an attempt to expunge from the record one of the most notorious events in Belarusian history and one of the most important sources of inspiration for the Belarusian national movement over the last two decades.

Mr. Yukho noted that the small granite memorial presented to the people of Belarus by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton when he visited that site in 1994 had served as a focal point for the Belarusian opposition. The discovery in the 1980s of the Kuropaty mass graves helped power the rise of the Belarusian democratic movement. Activists of the Belarusian People's Front say that the graves, located in a forest near the national capital, contain the remains of hundreds of thousands killed in the 1930s. But officials of the current Belarusian regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka have attempted to play down the importance of Kuropaty and insist that there are no more than 7,000 dead buried there.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the damage to this monument, and no one has been arrested or identified as a suspect.

But the significance of the monument for the country's democratic movement and the timing of this attack may lead at least some in the Belarusian opposition to suspect that supporters of President Lukashenka have somehow been involved. If that is the case, recent history suggests that no one is ever likely to be charged or convicted of this crime.

That will certainly have consequences, because, from the time of their discovery, the mass graves at Kuropaty have been one of the prime motivating factors behind the country's national and democratic movements. Indeed, most activists in those movements over the last decade have sought to honor the Kuropaty site, frequently insisting that visitors to Belarus must go there to understand that country and its past.

Indeed, as Mr. Yukho made clear to Western news agencies, Belarusian democrats were at the site several days earlier and thus are in a position to date more or less precisely when the destruction of the monument took place. Moreover, the fact that the U.S. government erected this monument is for many Belarusian democrats a symbol of the interest of the West in Belarusian independence and democracy.

Consequently, many democratic activists there are certain to blame the Lukashenka regime and its supporters for this action - all the more so since the destruction of this monument took place just as the Belarusian opposition had joined forces to advance a single candidate, Wadimir Honcharyk, to run against Mr. Lukashenka in presidential elections now scheduled for September 9.

So far, the destruction of the Kuropaty monument has attracted relatively little attention in either the Belarusian or international media. But because of its centrality in the life of many Belarusians, the demolition of this monument may have consequences very different than some might expect and may lead to greater activism by the democratic opposition in Belarus.

Indeed, this action in Belarus recalls one of the more infamous stories of the Cold War. Once, when he came to the United Nations, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned the Greek prime minister that if Athens continued to support NATO and the West, it might be necessary for Moscow to attack the Acropolis with nuclear weapons.

The Greek leader responded that Mr. Khrushchev might very well be able to destroy the buildings on the Acropolis but that the Soviet leader would never be able to destroy the ideas of democracy and freedom to which the Greeks gave birth more than two millennia ago.

In like manner, the vandalization at Kuropaty is unlikely to expunge the memory of the events it commemorates.

Paul Goble is the publisher of RFE/RL Newsline.

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