Members of the Organizing Committee for Commemoration of Stalinism’s Victims Expelled from Writer’s House

According to www.charter97.org

Members of the organizing committee for commemoration of victims of Stalin’s repressions weren’t allowed to hold a sitting in a room of the Writer’s House. Several days before the sitting the co-chair of the committee Vasil Iakavenka received the agreement of the house administration for holding the committee’s assembly there. However, when the committee members arrived, they were told that the key to the room ‘was missing’. Then the guards ordered them to leave the house.

’There were twelve of us there. We moved to the hall near the cafй. We decided to adopt promptly the major documents: Appeal to the Citizens and Appeal to the Veterans. But the guard turned the building of the Writers’ House into a special security object. They ordered us to leave the building immediately. Finally a policeman came up to us and we told him that we were going to finish our meeting soon and then leave’ the secretary of the organizing committee Uladzimir Ramanouski reported to RFE/RL.

Usually members of the organizing committee gathered weekly on Mondays in the office of Belarusian Language Society, but yesterday they failed to gather there because the BSL was having its own event. ‘We are facing the problem with finding the place for our meetings and it is becoming more and more acute’, Uladzimir Ramanouski says. ‘It is so humiliating and savage that the people who are doing their best to commemorate hundreds of thousands of victims are treated in such a way’.



Nevertheless, the final text of the ‘Remember 1937’ leaflet was adopted yesterday. The decision was made to commemorate victims of the Stalin’s repressions on the Remembrance Day in the Chaliuskintsy Park and Kurapaty suburb on 17 April.