DISINFO: EU diplomats distort historical facts about the Kurapaty memorial site in Belarus
SUMMARY
It is questionable whether the West and EU in particular is ready to carry out a dialogue with Belarus given the information war and distortions of historical facts. European diplomats visited the Kurapaty memorial site in Belarus. The delegation was headed by Steen Nørlov, Chargé d'affaires of the EU to Belarus. He has troubles with historical facts and is not aware of the killings in this area by fascists during the Great Patriotic War. In 2020, the EU countries were doing their best to destabilise Belarus and bring the so-called democracy.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Western attempts to organise a colour revolution in Belarus linked with false claims concerning the Kurapaty memorial site in Belarus.
EUvsDisinfo database contains multiple examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation claims about ‘colour revolutions’ in Belarus which were repeatedly debunked (e.g. here, here and here). Also read our earlier analysis demonstrating that the pro-Kremlin disinformation claims about a ‘colour revolution’ in Belarus in 2020-2021 and in Kazakhstan in January 2021 were nearly identical.
Kurapaty is an area on the outskirts of Minsk, where at least 30,000 people (according to some estimates, up to 100,000 people or more) were executed for political reasons by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD in the period between 1937 and 1941. The 1988 discovery of the undocumented mass graves in the Kurapaty area added momentum to the pro-independence movement in Belarus. The facts about the Soviet NKVD massacre was repeatedly confirmed by the Soviet and earlier Belarusian official investigations.
On 30 October 2023, the anniversary of mass killing of Belarusian writers and cultural workers by Soviet NKVD back in 1937, diplomats of EU countries, UK, and Switzerland visited the Kurapaty memorial site to commemorate the victims of Stalinist repressions in Belarus.
The Belarusian authorities do not hold any official commemoration ceremonies at the site as it is inconvenient for their official historical policy of presenting the Soviet period of Belarus’ history in an exclusively positive light and virtually the main source of the national identity.
Occasionally, pro-regime pundits have looked to contradict the evidence and official findings and try attribute the mass graves in the Kurapaty area to killings during the Nazi occupation.
The level of protection and preservation of the site is largely insufficient and civic commemoration initiatives are actively hindered or destroyed. For instance, in 2019, the Belarusian authoritiesbegan digging up wooden crosses at the Kurapaty memorial site without a prior notification of society. These actions provoked protests from the population and disapproval from representatives of major churches. At the same time, pro-Kremlin sources published conspiracies claiming that the Kurapaty memorial site became a Western project to destabilise Belarus and ruin Belarusian statehood. Pro-Kremlin sources also claimed (see our debunk here) that Zianon Pazniak, Belarusian historian and politician who discovered the site in 1988, was a CIA agent who invented the Kurapaty story to discredit USSR’s NKVD and thus contributed to USSR’s destruction.
Contrary to the claims of the regime propaganda, European diplomats also regularly lay flowers to commemorate the victims of crimes under German Nazi occupation, notably in Minsk and at the Khatyn memorial site.
Read our earlier analysis examining the manipulations of historical events in Belarus under Lukashenko for present day political gains.