Minsk Memorial in Kuropaty forest Catholic and Orthodox leaders have condemned the bulldozing of memorial crosses at a site of communist-era mass executions.
Media reports said at least 15 protesters were arrested in early April when police cordoned off an area of the Kuropaty Forest, outside Minsk in Belarus and bulldozers moved in to demolish about 70 15-foot crosses, which were taken away in unmarked trucks. The crosses marked the site where tens of thousands of execution victims were thrown in mass graves, mostly between 1937 and 1941.
“I feel desperate about the removal of these crosses,” said Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, chairman of the Belarusian bishops’ conference.
“Perhaps some order is needed in this place, and perhaps it was necessary to move the crosses temporarily and then replace them. We also do such things – but not without telling people,” he said.
The nation’s Catholic bishops’ conference demanded “an urgent stop” to the destruction of the crosses in Kuropaty, which they called one of the country’s “many Golgothas” and a “holy place of memory and prayer”.