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  • Brest Court Recognizes Two Books by Zianon Pazniak as Extremist Literature

    On April 20, the Maskouski district court of Brest recognized two books by Zianon Pazniak "Good Photography" and "Defense of Kurapaty. People's Memorial" as extremist literature.

    Вокладка кнігі Зянона Пазьняка «Добрая фатаграфія»

    As we report­ed ear­li­er, two books of each title were seized by the local cus­tom’s office from Aleś Čachol­s­ki, an activist of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Par­ty of the BPF. In Novem­ber 2015, the expert com­mis­sion on extrem­ism of the Brest region held an assess­ment of three books authored by Zianon Paz­ni­ak and claimed that two of them con­tained signs of extrem­ism, refer­ring the case to court in order to ban the book from dis­tri­b­u­tion.

    Aleś Čachol­s­ki tried to dis­pute the deci­sion of the com­mis­sion, how­ev­er, on Feb­ru­ary 23 the court in Brest reaf­firmed it. The activist insists that experts of the com­mis­sion are pro-gov­ern­ment only, all mem­bers of Belaya Rus’, an asso­ci­a­tion sup­port­ing Lukashenko. The author of the books Zianon Paz­ni­ak was one of his main oppo­nents in 90ies, who fled Belarus when large-scale repres­sions against oppo­si­tion politi­cians start­ed; cur­rent­ly he lives in exile.

    Čachol­s­ki will file an appeal against the court deci­sion.

    One of books «Good pho­tog­ra­phy» is a mix­ture of pho­tos and essays com­ment­ing the images. It con­tains works of well-known old-times pho­tog­ra­phers, as well as con­tem­po­rary, some­times unau­thored pho­tos from the web. Among all, it con­tains pho­tos from recent his­to­ry — images of Lukashenko, of dis­per­sal of 2011 silent actions and the like.

    The oth­er book tells about Kura­p­aty, the mass bur­ial dat­ing back to the time of Stal­in­ist repres­sions which the author­i­ties refuse to rec­og­nize and inves­ti­gate. Instead of mak­ing the memo­r­i­al, the author­i­ties attempt­ed to ruin the mem­o­ry of its total­ly, mak­ing the city ring road along the sup­posed place of mass graves. The book shows doc­u­ments, like cor­re­spon­dence with the author­i­ties on this mat­ter, doc­u­ments and pho­tos of exca­va­tions, and lat­er on pho­tos of protest actions.

    Both the books are free for down­load in PDF for­mat from elec­tron­ic library here.

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