Current Situation
According to 2009 census Polish minority in Belarus numbers officially about 295,000. After the Russian minority, Poles certainly form the second largest minority group in Belarus. The majority of Poles live in the Western regions including 230,000 in the Hrodna voblast. The largest Polish organization in Belarus is the Union of Poles in Belarus (Związek Polaków na Białorusi), with over 20,000 members.
As Poland supports the pro-democracy opposition in Belarus, Polish-Belarusian relations are poor, and representatives of the Polish minority in Belarus often complain about various repressions, such as the jailing for 15 days, of the former head of the Union of Poles, Tadeusz Gawin. He was sentenced on 2 August 2005 for arranging a meeting between a visiting deputy speaker of the Polish parliament, Donald Tusk, and the ethnic Polish activists including Veslaw Kewlyak, also sentenced for 15 days. The Lukashenko government launched a campaign against the Polish ethnic minority claiming that they were trying to destabilise the balance of power, and that the Polish minority is a fifth column (see, earlier Soviet proclamations). In May and June of that year a Polish diplomat was expelled, a Polish-language newspaper was closed and the democratically-elected leadership of a local Polish organisation, the Union of Poles in Belarus (UPB), had their own nominees forcibly replaced by those sympathetic to Lukashenko.
The introduction of the Karta Polaka (Polish Charter) in 2007 confirming Polish heritage of individuals who cannot obtain dual citizenship in their own countries, enabled many thousands of inhabitants of Belarus to formally declare their Polish identity for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland. The introduction caused protests from Belarusian officials.
Poles in Belarus have an unusual linguistic situation; a slight majority use Belarusian, while a majority of ethnic Belarusians actually use Russian, as do the rest of the Poles. This unusual situation arose because the Poles in Belarus live mostly in the Belarusian-speaking parts of the country, whereas Russian now dominates in Minsk and most of eastern Belarus. Very few Belarusian Poles use Polish in everyday life.
Read more about this topic: Poles In Belarus
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