August 21, Pozirk. Schools in Belarus will host monthly lectures on genocide against Belarusians for students of all grades, said Natalla Dudkina, an education official with the Minsk Regional Executive Committee.
The genocide awareness campaign fosters civic consciousness and patriotism, she said.
It is important that children “remember and do not repeat the mistakes of the past,” she added.
Following the 2020 postelection protests, authorities in Minsk launched a campaign to highlight the genocidal dimensions of massacres committed by the Germans in 1941-43.
Two years ago, Alaksandar Łukašenka signed a law to criminalize genocide denial, while officials and propaganda workers often try to pin genocide on opposition activists by calling them “fascists.”
Prosecutor General Andrej Švied personally contributed content by editing the Genocide against the Belarusian People During the Great Patriotic War textbook for five-graders, in which he accuses voters who took to the street to protest election fraud in 2020 of using Nazi symbols.
Švied also referred to Belarus’ historic white-red-white flag, used by the opposition, as a “symbol of Nazism and genocide.”
In his interview with SB. Belarus Segodnya he actually acknowledged that the genocide investigation is about propaganda. He said it was intended to “consolidate civil society” and “ensure the ideological continuity of generations.”
In late June, he said that a criminal investigation established a wider scale of atrocities committed in Belarus during the Nazi occupation than previously assumed.
The Nazi burned down at least 12,348 villages, some together with their inhabitants, he said. This is 3,148 more than 9,200 documented before the genocide investigation.
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