2023-05-01 09:20:00
Belsat TV journalists, on the basis of anonymity, talked to Poles whose children attend Belarusian educational institutions.
Propaganda in schools
According to one of the interviewees, anti-Polish propaganda is put into the heads of seven- and eight-year-olds. “They say about Poland that it is preparing to attack Belarus, is gathering tanks on the border, that it is our enemy. They always oppressed Belarusians, they considered them slaves until Russia liberated them. On the occasion of September 17, it is said that the Soviet Union freed Belarus from the Polish yoke. Previously, Poles allegedly murdered thousands of Belarusians. Now Poles are fascists and they are destroying monuments to liberators,” reads the article “Show Poland where it belongs.”
According to Belsat’s interlocutors, instructions regarding anti-Polish propaganda come from above. Some teachers try to avoid this topic, but most are “the most faithful soldiers in the ideological war.” As an anonymous source points out, very often teachers who have absolutely anti-Polish views are holders of the Pole’s Card. In his opinion, the Polish government should deprive them of this document.
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Read more: Conversation just before the arrest. Andrzej Poczobut on the anti-Polish campaign in Belarus
Lukashenko versus the Polish minority
Lukashenka’s relations with the Polish minority, says the director of Belsat TV Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy, over the years have been characterized by a certain sine wave.
— In 2005, the Union of Poles in Belarus had the ambition that it would choose power on its own and would not look back at Lukashenko and the Belarusian authorities. It turned out that this could not be done. The democratic ZPB was dispersed by the authorities and since then there have basically been two structures. That is, the unofficial one existed, and the official one practically did not exist. It must be remembered that in 2006 the ZPB was hit by a whole lot of repression. Almost all Polish houses were taken. That is, some pieces of Polish houses survived and it was possible to use them, but generally most of them were taken away. In addition, a number of people have been arrested. These were mainly administrative detention centers. Later, Andrzej Poczobut was convicted, but for defamation of Alexander Lukashenko. Anyway, for all these years the union functioned without a seat. It operated on the basis of establishing various companies and operated on their basis. At some point, there was indeed a thaw. It is true that Lukashenko’s authorities never decided to recognize the real Union of Poles in Belarus, which really represented the people. Nevertheless, they allowed him to act. In the years 2015-2017, basically everything functioned normally. Although informally, there were schools and branches. After 2020, absolutely everything was screwed on, so it was decided to screw the screw on Poles as well, explains Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy in an interview with “Kurier Wileński”.
It was then that some ZPB activists had to leave the country, and some went to prison. Among others, the president of ZPB, Andżelika Borys, and the journalist Andrzej Poczobut were arrested. While Borys has been released, Poczobut is still in prison.
Read more: Eight years in prison for the right to be Polish. Reaction to Andrzej Poczobut’s verdict
Return to the USSR
Romaszewska-Guzy believes that the current rhetoric of the authorities in Minsk is a kind of return to the Soviet past.
“I think it’s about building an image of an external enemy, but of course the external enemy also has its own fifth column. When there is a Polish minority, it is known that it is suspicious. This was the case in the Soviet Union, when you did not write Poles in the documents, but gave a different nationality. Now this trend is coming back,” said the director of Belsat TV.
Are the inhabitants of Belarus susceptible to anti-Polish rhetoric and government propaganda in general?
“This propaganda doesn’t have much future because, in my opinion, the number of people who really believe in it is small. I ask myself: how effective is propaganda? In my opinion, a small one. It seems to me that people simply wouldn’t believe it if Poles really started an uprising in the middle of Belarus, because they would consider it propaganda. Although this element in Belarusian propaganda borders on madness – explains Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy, in whose opinion the anti-Polish rhetoric is largely caused by Lukashenko’s personal aversion to Poles.
| Photo. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
National Unity Day
On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Poland without declaring war. On June 7, 2021, practically a year after mass protests caused by rigged elections, Alyaksandr Lukashenko introduced a new holiday on this day – National Unity Day. “This day became an act of historical justice for the Belarusian nation – divided against its will in 1921 by the Peace of Riga – and has been forever entrenched in the national historical tradition,” reads the official justification of the Belarusian president’s decree. In response to Lukashenka’s decree, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland issued a special statement in which official Minsk was criticized for “basing the historical policy of Belarus on the legacy of the Stalin-Hitler pact.”
A few months later, Lukashenko again declared that the Soviet invasion of the Second Polish Republic had saved Belarus. “Just think, if it wasn’t for September 17, our country wouldn’t exist. On the map there would be only a patch from the center of today’s Belarus to Mazyr,” said the head of the Belarusian state.
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