Kurapaty

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Kurapaty (Belarusian: Курапаты) is a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk, Belarus, where in 1941 a vast number of people were executed. At least 30,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 people are estimated to have perished there. There have been investigations by both the Soviet, and Belarusian governments, which have been inconclusive as to the perpetrators. Believed either to be the Soviet NKVD, or the invading German forces.

The discovery by historian Zianon Pazniak and exhumation of the remains in 1988 gave an added momentum to the pro-democracy and pro-independence movement in Belarus in the last years of Soviet Union before it collapsed.

United States President Bill Clinton visited Kurapaty forest in 1994, when he came to Belarus with a "thank you" visit after Belarus agreed to ship nuclear weapons back to Russia. Clinton presented a small granite monument "To Belarusians from the American people", perhaps the first post-Soviet cultural artefact from the U.S. on Belarusian soil. The monument was damaged three times by unidentified vandals, but subsequently restored.

In 2001, when the Kurapaty site came under the threat from a planned widening of the Minsk Ring Road, its defenders (youth from the Belarusian Popular Front, Zubr and smaller organizations) occupied the site and sat out a bitter winter in tents.

On October 29, 2004, the Jewish community of Belarus installed a monument in memory of the Jews and other nationals who were murdered in Kurapaty forest. The brown granite stone has two inscriptions in Yiddish and in Belarusian: "To our fellow-believers—Jews, Christians and the Muslims—the victims of Stalinism from the Belarusian Jews."

Each year in November, on Dziady (the All Saints or the day when Belarusians commemorate their deceased forefathers), hundreds of people visit this site of crimes of Soviet political repression. The first such demonstration in 1988, in which there were tens of thousands of participants, was brutally dispersed by the police. Officials from the administration of Alexander Lukashenko do not recognize the Kurapaty case as a certain Soviet crime against humanity and never mention Kurapaty in public.