Brest Court Recognizes Two Books by Zianon Pazniak as Extremist Literature

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.