Poland lodges protest over demolition of WWII soldiers’ cemetery in Belarus

Poland has lodged a complaint to Belarus over the destruction of a cemetery for Polish wartime resistance fighters. Warsaw says that the incident is part of an “anti-Polish campaign by the Belarusian authorities”.

The graveyard was located in Mikulishki, in the western Belarusian region of Grodno, which before World War Two was part of Poland. The site was for soldiers from Poland’s underground Home Army, who during the war fought to liberate Vilnius from German occupation.

All 22 crosses there have been removed and the memorial “barbarously razed to the ground”, tweeted the Polish embassy in Belarus. “Polish national memorial sites in Belarus will not be forgotten. Glory to the Heroes,” it added, showing an image of charge d’affaires Marcin Wojciechowski visiting the destroyed site.

The demolition of the site – which was inaugurated and consecrated 20 years ago – was originally reported by Głos znad Niemna, a news outlet run by the large ethnic Polish community in Belarus.

This was a “barbaric act of state vandalism”, tweeted Polish opposition MP Robert Tyszkiewicz, alongside images showing the cemetery before and after its destruction. He called for “a firm reaction from the Polish authorities”.

In a statement issued yesterday, Poland’s foreign ministry announced that it had summoned Belarus’s chargé d’affaires “to lodge a strong protest against the demolition of the Home Army soldiers’ cemetery in Mikulishki”

“This particularly disgraceful event is an example of how the current authorities of Belarus are violating all the commitments the country has made about the memorial sites in its territory,” if added. “We strongly condemn this anti-Polish campaign of the Belarusian authorities having as its aim the elimination of Polish traces in Belarus.”

“The act resembles the darkest episodes in the history of communism, and given the earlier accounts of the devastation of Polish war graves, it can only be construed as done on purpose in order to further degrade the mutual relations between Poland and Belarus,” continued the statement.

Wartime commemoration sites have long been a source of controversy between Belarus, Poland, Russia and Ukraine, with tensions intensifying following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Last month, Poland protested the removal of Polish flags from two sites in Russia where thousands of Polish officers murdered by the Soviets during World War Two are buried. Warsaw called it an “act of hostility” and “element of an anti-Polish campaign”.

Russia has in turn expressed anger at Poland’s dismantlement of a number of monuments to the Soviet Red Army as part of a drive to “decommunise” public spaces. The last two years have also seen a clampdown on the Polish minority in Belarus.

However, the latest episode in Belarus is the first time soldiers’ graves have been removed from a memorial site. Among those to condemn it was former Belarusian ambassador to Poland Pavel Latushka.

“This is barbarism absolutely contrary to Belarusian tradition,” said Latushka, quoted by the Polish Press Agency (PAP). “This is an act of Lukashenko’s policy showing his attitude towards the Polish nation.”

Poland’s Home Army, which worked in unison with the London-based Polish government-in-exile, is believed by many historians to have been the largest underground force in occupied Europe, with estimates of its maximum size ranging between 200,000 and 600,000.

Main image credit: Marek ZaniewskiFacebook

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.