Belarus
Belarus has a constitutional government with executive, legislative and
judicial branches, but the president exercised total control over most aspects
of the government by the end of the year.
Since his election as the first president in July 1994, Aleksandr Lukashenko
has steadily amassed power in the executive branch.
A new parliament was seated in January, but the president restricted it
from carrying out nearly all its constitutional duties and dissolved it
following a controversial constitutional referendum in November. The president
repeatedly ignored limits on the authority of the executive branch.
The economy is still largely state-controlled and continued its steady decline
since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Only limited, small-scale privatization
has occurred and, although most prices have been liberalized, those of staple
food products are controlled by the government.
Most state enterprises have not been restructured, and many are operating
at a fraction of their capacity. According to official statistics, per capita
gross domestic product at the end of 1995 was $1,000.
A Jewish community was established in 1506 in the town of Pinsk in the
territory now known as Belarus (formerly Byelorussia). According to a census
taken in 1897, Jews comprised 13.6 per cent of the population, forming the
majority in the principal cities of the region. As was customary throughout
the area, some Jews were enlisted by the nobility and wealthy landowners
as collectors of taxes while others became innkeepers, occupations that
earned them the hatred of the impoverished peasants. The early Jewish communities
were exposed to further danger by Russian marauders who carried out massacres
and forced conversions in some communities.
When the area fell under the control of tsarist Russia the fate of its Jewish
population became inextricably bound up with the Jewish population of Russia
and subsequently the Soviet Union (see Russia). During the period of Nazi
occupation, the Jewish population of the former Soviet republic of Byelorussia
was decimated.
In the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign from the late 1960s to the early 1980s,
a number of Byelorussian propagandists, notably Vladimir Begun, regularly
published antisemitic material.
Since the collapse of the Soviet communist regime, the rights of Belarusian
Jewry have been fully respected.
An unregistered branch of Aleksandr Barkashev's Russian National Unity
party (see Russia) operates in Belarus. According to Andrey Valyulin, the
branch's leader, "Zionism, the highest stage of Judaism, is hostile
to us. We are guided by the principle 'Love thine enemy, hate the enemies
of Christ, beat the enemies of the Fatherland'."
Ultra-nationalist parties that are registered are the Slavyansky sobor-Belaya
Rus (SSBR, Slav Council-White Russia), which is led by Nikolay Sergeyev
and is reported to have a membership of about 1,000, and the small Liberalno-demokraticheskaya
partiya Belarusa (LDPB, Liberal Democratic Party of Belarus), a branch of
Vladimir Zhirinovsky's party (see Russia) that is led by Sergey Gaydukevich.
Neither party openly espouses antisemitic, or even "anti-Zionist",
expressions but in private conversations some representatives of these parties
are no less antisemitic than members of the Barkashev party.
The pro-communist and pan-Slavic Belarusskoye patrioticheskoe dvizheniye
(BPD, Belarusian Patriotic Movement) is led by retired general A. Barankevich.
Barankevich is reported to have spoken at a meeting organized by the Russian
extremist paper Russky narod (The Russian People) and to have published
sections of his speech in the antisemitic Russian newspaper Kolokol (see
Russia).
Other tiny extremist parties are the Belarusskaya partiya svobody (BPS,
Belarusian Freedom Party), Pravy revansh (PR, Right Revenge) and Bely legion
(BL, White Legion).
On 17 April, in an interview in the government paper Byelorusskaya niva (Belarusian Cornfield), Valery Shchukin, secretary of the Parliamentary Commission on National Security and a member of the communist faction in parliament, referred to the alleged plans of Israel's Mossad to remove President Lukashenko from office and to a "Zionist-Masonic" world plot against the Slav states and peoples.
Jewish cemeteries and monuments in Gomel, Borisov, Minsk and other cities are reported to have been desecrated in 1996, though no further details were available.
No antisemitic books or newspapers were published in 1996. There were,
however, a number of antisemitic articles.
The writer and former Communist Party member Eduard Skobelev remarked in
issue number 8 of the Tsentralnaya gazeta (Central Newspaper) and
issue number 26 of the paper Svobodnye novosti-plus (Free News-plus):
"Marxism reflected the age-old aspirations of the Jewish people. Marxism
is in its entirety a transposition of the fanatical precepts of Moses into
modern language."
On 2 August Aleksey Malashko, an anti-Zionist and antisemitic writer and
propagandist from the Brezhnev era, wrote in the newspaper Partiya kommunistov
Belarusi: "Zionist producers organized the assassinations of top
officials of the [Russian] Empire who were suspected of being antisemitic.
Among them were the uncle of [Tsar] Nicholas II and the Moscow Governor-General
Sergey Aleksandrovich. In 1918 it was the turn of the Tsar himself and his
family. Representatives of that same nationality carried out this vile act,
but, in truth, holding different party cards . . ."
In large cities such as Minsk and Vitebsk, Russian extremist publications,
including newspapers such as Zavtra and Duel (see Russia) could easily
be bought.
The only reported instance of this form of antisemitism is an article by the Orthodox priest F. Krivonos that appeared in the February issue of Tserkovnoe slovo (Word of the Church). The author alluded to "the Jewish roots" of the persecution of the Byelorussian clergy during the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s.
Only a few, tiny extremist organizations adhere to an antisemitic ideology,
although even they tend to mask their anti-Jewish sentiments. Any antisemitic
remarks that appear from time to time in the press tend to go unnoticed
by the Belarusian population at large. The dictatorial tendencies of the
current regime are clearly a matter of concern to the Jewish minority.
© JPR 1997