Lukashenko about Riga Peace Treaty results: its price is the broken fates of millions of Belarusians
Speaking at the large-scale patriotic forum – This is OUR history! – dedicated to National Unity Day, the President of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, recalled what the results the Riga Peace Treaty had for our country
The Belarusian Head of State noted, “Look at what the sovereign state of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Belorussiya was like in 1921 after the conclusion of the Riga Peace Treaty: 6 districts of the former Minsk Province on an area of just over 52,000sq.km with a population of about one and a half million people. This treaty was not peaceful for Western Belarusians.”
According to Aleksandr Lukashenko, the price of territorial losses is the broken fates of millions of Belarusians, “Those are still alive whose memory keeps memories of the painful 18 years of life on different sides of the border, which passed not only through villages and cities, but also through human souls and hearts. The border that divided a single nation. We remember how Belarusians – devoted to their traditions, culture, faith and language – if they had anything at that time, were bitter ‘orphan’ bread, slave labour and destroyed families.”
The Belarusian leader reminded that they rose up to fight on their own, stood up for the defence of national culture, language, their human dignity, deploying a large-scale partisan movement and paying even then – before the Great Patriotic War – for freedom with their lives. “Historians have counted several hundred large and small uprisings of Belarusians and Ukrainians during the 20-year Polish interwar period: from WWI to WWII and the Great Patriotic War. We remember the cruelty with which the Skidel uprising was suppressed, when the Polish gendarmes slaughtered everyone, not sparing the elderly, women and children. We remember the wild tortures to which the prisoners of the Bereza-Kartuzskaya concentration camp were subjected. And we will remember the heroes who have become symbols of popular resistance in Western Belarus: Sergei Pritytsky, Vera Khoruzhaya, Ded Talash, Kirill Orlovsky, Stanislav Vaupshasov and other of our countrymen. Even today we see the strength and greatness of the unconquered Belarusian spirit in the works of Maksim Tank, Valentin Tavlai, Maksim Sevruk, Grigory Shirma and many others. We see, we feel and we remember.”
