Solemn event honouring Belarus’ National Unity Day held in Moscow
National Unity Day was celebrated in the business and cultural complex of Belarus’ Embassy in Russia, and – as informed by the diplomatic mission – Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Dmitry Krutoi opened the event with a welcoming speech
As noted by the diplomat, the holiday was established by a decree of the President of Belarus, and it is celebrated annually on September 17th.
“The date was chosen not accidentally: it was on September 17th, 1939 that the Red Army's liberation campaign in Western Belarus began. It took less than ten days for our people – split by the terms of the Riga Peace Treaty that was unfair towards Belarusians – to fully reunite,” Mr. Krutoi said.
“Meanwhile, two decades of truly difficult years preceded that fateful event: half of the territory of modern Belarus was viewed as eastern suburbs of the new RzechPospolita,” the diplomat stated. “It is an undeniable historical fact that the Polish authorities staged an actual ethnocide against the Belarusian people, as it had earlier been in place during the first RzechPospolita times. At present, not many people know that, from 1934 until September 17th, 1939, a concentration camp operated in the village of Bereza-Kartuzskaya, and its regime was not inferior to the barbaric orders reigning in concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Social tension was complemented by national and religious oppression, but the Belarusian people never put up with their servitude, and they were insistently fighting for social and national liberation.”
As a result, in the autumn of 1939, the territory of Belarus regained its integrity, returning to the mainstream of its century-old historical tradition. “The unification of the artificially split Belarusian people became an act of historical justice," the diplomat stressed.
