MINSK (AFP-EJP)---Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko on Monday took part in unprecedented commemorations for the hundreds of thousands of Jews killed in Belarus under Nazi occupation in World War II.
"Ideas of xenophobia and ethnic injustice should never be celebrated....
The principles of humanism and goodwill carry great importance for Belarussians," Lukashenko told a gathering in the centre of Minsk, the Belarussian capital, by a pit where more than 5,000 Jews were shot by Nazi forces.
"One mustn't forget these tragic events. If we forget them, they could be repeated," he said.
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Leonid Levin, head of the main union of Belarus Jewish organisations, who attended Monday's ceremony in Minsk:"This is an extremely important event, the likes of which we haven't seen in a decade." "The way the Holocaust is viewed by the head of state in principle is the way it will be viewed by the people, who were brought up under decades of Soviet anti-Semitism."
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Altogether more than 800 000 Jews were exterminated in Belarus during World War II, including 50.000 Jews forcibly displaced from central and western European countries.
More than 200.000 people were massacred or cremated alive in “Maly Trastsyanets”, the biggest Nazi death camp on the territory of the former USSR, but some sources put the figure at 500,000.
A series of Holocaust monuments were to be unveiled this week marking events that were wiped from public consciousness under the Soviet system that ignored the war-time fate of Jews both in Belarus -- one of Europe's most vibrant pre-war Jewish centres -- and elsewhere.
Among monuments to be inaugurated is a tombstone shaped memorial engraved with a Belarussian, English and Hebrew text placed outside a Minsk cinema marking the centre of the former ghetto.
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Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko hailed a decision by the European Union to suspend a travel ban on himself and several associates. "I greatly value these steps, which were not easily achieved considering that the EU is made up of 27 states. I think we have good prospects for cooperation with the EU," Lukashenko said while attending a Holocaust memorial event. "All obstacles and impediments to dialogue with the European Union have been removed," he added. EU foreign ministers last week lifted a ban on travel to the EU that applied to 41 Belarussians, comprising Lukashenko and his associates.
The travel ban was left in place for four figures deemed responsible for disappearances in the country in 1999-2000, as well as Belarussian electoral commission head Lydia Yermoshina.
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Several days of events are planned for the 65th anniversary of the deaths of more than 100,000 Jews in the Minsk ghetto in October 1943, including several thousand transported from western Europe. More than 250 ghettos were exterminated in other Belarussian towns and villages.
The comments by President Lukashenko, who has been ostracized by the United States as Europe's "last dictator," represented a dramatic about-face on the subject of the Holocaust.
Hitherto, he had stuck to a Soviet policy of not differentiating the fate of Jews in World War II from general Soviet losses, leaving a veil over Nazi Germany's special targeting of Jews.
In October 2007, the Belarussian president was accused by Israel of making blatant anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli statements. Commenting on the state radio the "miserable state of the city of Babruysk,” he said: "This is a Jewish city and the Jews are not concerned for the place they live in. They have turned Babruysk into a pigsty. Look at Israel – I was there and saw it myself.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry protested officially but Lukashenko rejected accusations of anti-Semitism.
Jewish associations in Belarus warned against a rise of anti-Semitism in the country and expressed concern about the free publication of anti-Semitic magazines and books, the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and the closure of the sole Jewish university.
Around 35,000 Jews live in Belarus today.
One of the most famous villages in Belarus is Lubavitch, in the far east of the country, near the Russian border, where the worldwide Lubavitch movement had its origins.
Israeli President Shimon Peres is among several Israeli politicians born within the borders of today's Belarus, where Jews made up on average half the population of many towns and cities before the war.