Human Rights in Belarus - Antisemitism

Antisemitism

Alexander Lukashenko was accused of praising Adolf Hitler in a Russian NTV interview in 1995, saying that:

The history of Germany is a copy of the history of Belarus. Germany was raised from the ruins thanks to firm authority, and not everything connected with that well known figure, Adolf Hitler, was bad. German order evolved over the centuries and under Hitler it attained its peak.

This allegation was originally made by the Russian television channel NTV, on the basis of an interview given by Lukashenko to the German newspaper Handelsblatt in which Hitler was not mentioned. The original interviewer, Markus Zeiner, said "a tape of the interview had been quoted out of context and with the sequence of comments altered by the Russian media".

In 2004, Charter 97 reported that on some government-job applications Belarusians are required to state their nationality. This has been cited as evidence of state antisemitism in the region, as similar practices were allegedly used to discriminate against Jews in the USSR. They are also required to state information about their family and close relatives; this is alleged to be a breach of the constitution. Other countries (such as the United Kingdom) also ask applicants to state their ethnicity on application forms in many cases, although this information is usually used only for statistical purposes.

Belarus has been criticized by the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, many American senators and human-rights groups for building a football stadium in Grodno on the site of a historic Jewish cemetery. A website, www.stopthedigging.org (since shut down), was set up to oppose the desecration of the cemetery. The Lukashenko administration also faced criticism on this issue from members of the National Assembly and Jewish organizations in Belarus.

In January 2004, Forum 18 reported that Yakov Gutman (president of the World Association of Belarusian Jewry) accused Lukashenko of "personal responsibility for the destruction of Jewish holy sites in Belarus", accusing authorities of permitting the destruction of a synagogue to build a housing complex, demolishing a former shul in order to build a multi-story car park and destroying two Jewish cemeteries. According to the report, he was detained by police and taken to hospital after apparently suffering a heart attack.

In March 2004 Gutman announced that he was leaving Belarus for the U.S. in protest of state anti-Semitism. His view was echoed by a July 2005 report by UCSJ that a personal aide of the President (a former Communist Party ideologue, Eduard Skobelev) had published anti-Semitic books and promoted guns to solve what he termed the "Jewish problem". In 1997, Skobelev was given the title "Honored Figure of Culture" by Lukashenko and put in charge of the journal Neman.

The UCSJ's representative in Belarus, Yakov Basin, wrote a report detailing the authorities' alleged anti-Semitism. The only Jewish higher-education institute in Belarus (the International Humanities Institute of Belarusian State University) was closed in February 2004, in what many local Jews believe is a deliberate act of antisemitism to undermine their educational rights and position in society. However, it is not the only educational institution to face closure in Belarus; the last independent university in the nation, the European Humanities University (a secular institution, which received funding from the European Union, was closed in July 2004. Commentators have implied that this may be part of a wider move by Lukashenko to crush internal dissent.

Jewish observers cite antisemitic statements by legislators and other members of government and the failure of authorities in Belarus to punish perpetrators of antisemitic crime (including violent crime) as indicators of a policy of antisemitism in the state.

Praise for Lukashenko has appeared on several neo-Nazi websites, including the virulently antisemitic website Vanguard News Network. A 2005 article gloated about the situation in the country for Jews, making favourable comparisons with 1930s Germany. One neo-Nazi group, Support88, reportedly describes Lukashenko as being "the only bulwark against the empire of the New World Order" and describes opponents of the leader as "Zionists".