History repeating

My con­nec­tion to Belarus is even more tenu­ous than my con­nec­tion to Ukraine (grand­father, Dad’s side, born in Kiev).

From what my grand­father (Mum’s side) told me before he died, his Dad was born in Orsha (Belor­us­sia) and his mum in Lutsk (Ukraine). They fled per­se­cu­tion and pogroms via Lithuania to the US and then to Aus­tralia, arriv­ing here in 1914 and he was born a few months later. (Mum’s just gone over­seas to Russia to go to cousin Difa’s 85th birth­day party or I’m sure she’d cor­rect my hazy recol­lec­tions here. EDIT: And she did… cor­rect­ing both cities and adding that she thinks his par­ents arrived in the US aged 8 and 2 and that they were actu­ally second cousins). 

Anyway, I still have more interest in what’s hap­pen­ing in Belarus right now than makes any sense con­sid­er­ing I never met these people.

From the indy­media newswire:

Belarus­sian indy­media act­iv­ists call for solidarity!

This morn­ing Belarus­sian indy­media act­iv­ists in Minsk distributed
inform­a­tion, that last night 3:30 AM OMON moved to des­troy tent camp that has been put
up in the city center to protest fraud elec­tions in Belarus.
30–40 tents were trashed, around 500 people arres­ted. Among des­troyed tents
there was a tent of Belarus­sian Indy­media (belarus​.indy​media​.org), and
among arres­ted there were many rad­ical act­iv­ists, such as mem­bers of
anarcho-punk band Devi­ation (singer Stas Pochy­obut) and edit­ors of banned
satir­ical anarch­ist paper Navinki. Arres­ted people were heavily
bru­tal­ized. As all the police sta­tions in the city are full of people
arres­ted during last 10 days (oppos­i­tion estim­ates number of people
arres­ted all around Belarus as 5000), people arres­ted in square were taken
to unknown des­tin­a­tions off the city limits. Their place, con­di­tion and
charges pressed against them are cur­rently unknown.

Belarus­sian act­iv­ists also ask for any kind of solid­ar­ity actions in
Belarus­sian embassies around the world!