Image copyright AFP Image caption Crosses were removed to make way for a fence

Belarus officials have used bulldozers to demolish 70 crosses marking the site of mass executions during Joseph Stalin's communist dictatorship.

The crosses formed an unofficial memorial in the woods at Kuropaty, near the Belarusian capital Minsk.

About 30,000 victims of the Stalinist terror are buried there, officials say. But independent historians say as many as 200,000 were shot there by Soviet secret police in the 1930s and 40s.

Now police have cordoned off the site.

Belarusian media report that 15 civil society activists were detained there by police. Not all the crosses at the site were removed.

'Satanic blasphemy'

The bulldozing has been widely condemned in Belarus. An MP, Anna Kanopatskaya, witnessed it and wrote on Facebook (in Russian): "It's as if Satan came to Kuropaty. No Christian in the world raises a hand against a holy cross! All, ALL those who committed this blasphemy today will bring misfortune on themselves."

Image copyright AFP Image caption In the evening people held a prayer meeting to honour Stalin's victims

Last month Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko criticised those who had placed crosses at Kuropaty.

"We're going to restore order at Kuropaty, so that there are no demonstrations with crosses around the perimeter," he told a public meeting.

Mr Lukashenko has cracked down repeatedly on opponents, drawing criticism from Western politicians and human rights activists.

Activists including the opposition United Civil Party (UCPB) published photos of the bulldozing, on Twitter and elsewhere.

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Mr Lukashenko has run Belarus since 1994, maintaining Soviet-era symbols and security structures. Some Western officials call him "Europe's last dictator".

A Belarus forestry manager, quoted by the state news agency Belta, said the bulldozing was part of "renovation work" on the site.

"At the same time we are removing the illegally erected crosses. They are disappearing in the place where fencing is going up," said the manager, Alexander Mironovich.

Image copyright AFP Image caption Unofficial crosses have been marking the execution site for decades

No government memorial has been placed at Kuropaty, even though the exhumation of Stalin-era victims began there soon after it was revealed in 1988.

In Brest, south-western Belarus, the remains of Jews murdered by the Nazis in World War Two are being dug up from a mass grave recently unearthed during building work.</s>Belarus arrests 2 who want crosses at mass execution site

MINSK, Belarus (AP) — Police in Belarus have arrested an opposition leader and another activist as demonstrators for the second day try to prevent authorities from removing wooden crosses at a site near Minsk where tens of thousands of people were executed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

The Kurapaty woods near the capital have a strong significance for the beleaguered opponents of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko. He complained last month about the crosses that opposition supporters had set up there.

Fifteen other demonstrators were arrested Thursday after police closed off the woods and workers began removing the crosses. Pavel Sevyarinets of the Belarusian Christian Democracy party and another demonstrator were arrested Friday in a similar action.

Soviet secret police carried out mass executions at Kurapaty, with its victims estimated to range from 30,000 to 200,000 people.</s>MINSK -- Police in Belarus have detained at least 15 activists and politicians who protested the removal of dozens of wooden crosses commemorating victims of Soviet-era repressions.

 

 The crosses were being removed from a memorial site at Kurapaty, a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk where at least 30,000 people killed by Soviet authorities were buried during the 1930s and 1940s.

 

 Early in the morning, on April 4, eight excavators arrived at the site and started digging up the crosses. Police intervened when several activists tried to stop the excavators.

 

 The detained activists include former leader of the opposition Malady Front (Youth Front) movement, Zmitser Dashkevich; the co-chairman of the opposition Christian Democratic Party's founding committee, Paval Sevyarynets; and activists Dzyanis Urbanovich and Pilip Shaurau.

 

 It was not immediately clear on whose authority the crosses were being removed, as there was no official statement about the work from Belarusian government officials.

"They used excavators to immediately take the crosses away. They knocked down all the crosses along Zaslauye Road. There are many vehicles in the operation: excavators, tractors, dump trucks and others," Belsat quoted Sevyarynets as saying shortly before being detained.

 

 A Belsat correspondent added that uniformed and plainclothes police were preventing journalists from accessing the area.

 

 In 2017, Belarusian authorities halted the construction of a business center near the protected historical site at Kurapaty following a 15-day protest by activists.

 

 The protesters said at the time that the construction project would desecrate the memory of the victims of Soviet ruler Josef Stalin's repression.

 

 The government of Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka tolerates little dissent and authorities frequently break up protests.

 

 Lukashenka, who has been president since 1994, won a fifth term in a 2015 election that was deemed by Western monitors to be neither free nor fair.

With reporting by Belsat and AP</s>MINSK, Belarus — Police in Belarus have arrested 15 demonstrators who were trying to prevent the removal of wooden crosses from a wooded area near the capital of Minsk where tens of thousands of people were executed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

The Kurapaty woods have strong significance for the beleaguered opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko, who has retained many elements of the Soviet Union during his quarter-century in power.

Lukashenko last month complained about the crosses that opposition supporters had set up at Kurapaty, where Soviet secret police carried out mass executions. The number of estimated victims ranges from 30,000 all the way up to 200,000.

On Thursday, police closed off the perimeter of Kurapaty and forest workers began removing the crosses. Police say the protesters tried to interfere with the work.</s>Belarus police arrested 15 protesters Thursday who interfered with the demolition of 70 crosses at an unofficial memorial site where tens of thousands of victims were murdered during Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s communist rule.

Forest workers used bulldozers to remove 70 crosses in the Kurapaty woods, not far from the Belarussian capital of Minsk, at the site where Soviet secret police carried out mass executions during Stalin’s reign of terror.

BELARUS TO MOVE FORWARD WITH CONSTRUCTION OF APARTMENTS AT SITE OF NAZI-ERA MASS GRAVE

Though officials claim 30,000 victims are buried in these woods, historians estimate as many as 200,000 people were shot there by the secret police during the 1930s and 1940s, BBC News reported.

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in charge of the eastern European nation since 1994, criticized political opponents who placed crosses on the site. Lukashenko, dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” by some Western officials, maintained symbols and structures of Stalinist Soviet rule in the country.

"We're going to restore order at Kuropaty, so that there are no demonstrations with crosses around the perimeter," Lukashenko said in a public meeting last month, according to BBC News. Not all the crosses that were part of the unofficial memorial were demolished.

Fifteen activists were taken into custody by Belarusian police for interfering with the removal of some crosses, prompting an outcry from the president’s political rivals. Western leaders and human rights organizations have condemned Lukashenko before for suppressing his opposition.

"It's as if Satan came to Kuropaty. No Christian in the world raises a hand against a holy cross!” MP Anna Kanopatskaya wrote in Russian on Facebook after witnessing the demolition. “All, ALL those who committed this blasphemy today will bring misfortune on themselves."

The Belarussian government has not erected an official memorial in the Kurapaty woods even though the bodies of those shot by the Soviet secret police began to be exhumed after the site’s discovery in 1988, BBC News reported.

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"At the same time we are removing the illegally erected crosses,” a forestry manager, Alexander Mironovich, told the state news agency Belta of the “renovation work” on the property. “They are disappearing in the place where fencing is going up."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.</s>MINSK -- Two activists in Belarus have been detained as protests continued over the fate of a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk where at least 30,000 people killed by Soviet authorities were buried during the 1930s and 1940s.

Police took the two into custody on April 5 as they protested against workers installing metal fences around the area, a day after they removed some 70 wooden crosses commemorating victims of Soviet-era repressions from the memorial site at Kurapaty.

Two activists -- the co-chairman of the opposition Christian Democratic Party's founding committee, Paval Sevyarynets, who was broadcasting the workers' activities live viaon social media, and Nina Bahinskaya -- were detained by police at the site.

Witnesses said workers did not remove any of the remaining crosses, but excavators were present and work was conducted amid the playing of loud music, which the protesters said went against the somber nature of the area.

Sevyarynets and Bahinskaya were among 15 activists who were detained for several hours the day before at the site while protesting the removal of the crosses.

It remains unclear on whose authority the crosses were being removed, as there was no official statement about the work from Belarusian government officials.

Presidential spokeswoman Natallya Eismant said on April 4 that in his marathon press conference in March, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka promised "to bring Kurapaty to order," to make it "a place that looks proper, without any political connotations."

In 2017, Belarusian authorities halted the construction of a business center near the protected historical site following a 15-day protest by activists.

The protesters said at the time that the project would desecrate the memory of the victims of Soviet ruler Josef Stalin.

Lukashenka's government tolerates little dissent and authorities frequently break up protests.

Lukashenka, who has been president since 1994, won a fifth term in a 2015 election that was deemed by Western monitors as neither free nor fair.</s>The URL has been copied to your clipboard

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Police in Belarus have detained at last 15 activists who protested against the removal of dozens of wooden crosses from the Kurapaty memorial site commemorating victims of Soviet-era repressions.</s>The city of Brest, on the Belarusian side of its border with Poland, has kept a terrible secret in its city's historic district for almost 80 years: a mass grave containing more than 1,000 bodies.

The prime real estate inside the old city of Brest was once a Jewish ghetto, until the early 1940s, when its 28,000 residents -- roughly half the town -- died or were one of the lucky few who fled.

It has long been known that roughly 16,000 Jews, many from Brest, were killed by Nazi soldiers in a forest northwest of the city during World War II, and that the Germans had killed many more in the ghetto.

The 1,214 bodies were uncovered in February by construction workers preparing the ground for a new luxury apartment building. Piles of bones, estimated to be up to 2 meters deep in places, were found in a 40-meter long pit. The mass slaughter may not be unknown, but the magnitude of the killing and mass burial in the heart of the city is surprising.

"There was even an article about this mass grave in the Breast local newspaper in 1999," Regina Simonenko, head of Holocaust Museum in Brest, tells ABC News. "The only surprise is a huge number of remains that was unearthed."

Belarusian Maj. Pavel Galetsky has been visiting the site and combing through one of the darkest times of the Holocaust.

"The site was horrific, I felt like weeping when I saw so many remains of women and children, a female skeleton cradling a baby," Galetsky was quoted in Belarus press. "Victims had bullets in the back of their skulls, small children’s skulls or those of the teenagers."

The Jewish community in Brest, with international support, is now requesting the grave site be made into an official Holocaust memorial.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, in Los Angeles, sent an official letter to Belarus authorities to halt the building project.

"We firmly believe that the mass murder sites of the Holocaust should not be tampered with, and should remain the final resting places of the victims and places of commemoration, memory, and mourning," wrote Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The real estate developers and the city of Brest are offering a compromise. The building will not be built on the site, but instead next to it. The actual site will be turned into a park with a sign explaining what happened there.

City officials have promised the murder site will not be turned into a parking lot or a playground.

"The Holocaust Memorial will most likely be created there," said Alla Kondak, a city official who heads the culture department, told ABC News. Brest already has a memorial "just around the corner," where "a small marble stone is dedicated to the 34.000 Jews killed in and around Brest during WWII."

And for the new apartment building to be built next door, she says, "There should be a place where people can live well, a nice corner of the city of Brest."

Brest also has a Jewish section at the city’s cemetery and the city intends to transfer the earth from the exhumation site in May, and rebury the remains of the ghetto victims there, at the city's expense, despite Jewish religious rules against disturbing the dead.

Still, one resident born in Brest more that two decades after the war and living less than a mile from the site, told ABC News the terrible discovery provided a kind of closure.

"It is quite possible," she said, "that my maternal grandmother and my aunt and two granduncles were buried there."</s>Specialist soldiers unearthing the remains of a Second World War mass grave in Belarus have discovered a female skeleton cradling the remains of a baby.

Footage shows the excavation of more than 1,000 Jews from the construction site in the city of Brest which was occupied by Nazi Germany in the 1940s.

The site of the Nazi massacre - discovered on an old ghetto area earlier this year - was found after building work began on an elite apartment block.

‘There are clear bullet holes in the skulls,’ Dmitry Kaminsky, the military team leader, told the BBC.

Almost half the 50,000 people in the Eastern European city were Jews before the start of the Second World War, but shortly after the German invasion in June 1941, the instruction came to wipe them out.

Following the order, thousands were dragged onto trains and taken to a forest to be gunned down.

On October 1942 the city register kept by the Nazis states that 17,893 Jews live in Brest - the day after, the figure is ruled out.

Mikhail Kaplan, who lost aunts, uncles and cousins in the massacre, said his mother and father only managed to avoid being killed as they were away when the Nazis invaded Brest.

‘When my parents returned, the city was half empty,’ he told the publication.

The Jewish community in Brest is now pushing for the grave site to be made into an official Holocaust memorial - with the city only home to one currently.

However, the planting of trees next to the upcoming luxury flats is the only proposal being considered so far.

Alla Kondak, of the city's culture department said: ‘Some people say they're building on bones, but that isn't true. We will only stop [excavation] work once all the remains have been recovered.’

Previous mass graves have been located in Brest in 1950 - when some 600 victims were re-buried at Trishinskoe cemetery, and in 1970 when 300 victims were re-interred at Proska cemetery.

This article has been adapted from its original source.
Belarusian authorities begin demolishing crosses with bulldozers at the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic-era mass grave site Kurapaty on the outskirts of Minsk, where at least 30,000 people were executed by the NKVD's secret police in the 1930s and 1940s. The bulldozing is widely condemned in Belarus.