Today Belarus Celebrates Independence Day

20 years ago the Supreme Council of Belarus adopted a Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Republic of Belarus. The document declared Belarus as an independent state with “the independent and full power of its statehood within the borders of its territory and independence of the republic’s foreign policy”.

This date – July 27th – was commemorated as the Independence Day since 1991 and was of big importance for Belarus, a new country which declared its independence after 70 years of the Soviet Union and its destructive activities towards the Belarusian nation. That was a building stone for a new country.

However, the political hurls of the 90-ies and the establishing of the current regime could not let the idea of national independence live even in the form of a holiday – Independence Day, since in his first election campaign, the first president of Belarus (Lukashenko) was actively against the break away from the USSR and signing the Declaration of Independence.

As a result of the referendum in 1996, which was held with numerous falsifications, the Independence Day was moved to a much less “radically nationalistic” date of July 3rd – the day when the German troops left Minsk in 1944. A simple change of the date substituted also the meaning of the independence to a more convenient for the modern ideology of the Belarusian regime – it is not about the independence of the statehood of the Belarusian people any more, but about the independence from outside enemies, of which we are always reminded from the state TV channels and printed media.