br23 blog - minsk, belarus

Tomasz Wacko (pronounced Vah-ts-koh) died exactly three years ago. Until yesterday I didn’t even know he existed.
He was an opposition (”Solidarnosc”) activist from Poland, who found refuge in Norway and became a prominent human rights activist at the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, also devoting a lot of time and effort to the democracy cause in Belarus. […]

ARTE (one of my most favorite TV channels on ASTRA satellite) showed a very good movie tonight. It’s called Molly’s Way, and it’s a heartbreaking story of an Irish woman who had an unforgetable night with a cute Polish guy in Ireland, and now she came all the way across Europe to a small town […]

Today, Alexander Milinkevich met with the Polish president Lech Kaczynski and Polish prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz in Warsaw. And this is already second such meeting in the last several months. Together with the Polish prime minister Milinkevich signed an agreement that Polish government will provide scholarships in Poland to Belarusian students who were (or will […]

My most favorite sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem, died today in Kraków, Poland, at the age of 84. His books have been translated into 41 languages and sold over 27 million copies. At one point he was the most widely read science fiction author in the world.
I wrote about his books in this blog several months […]

The third annual session of Warsaw East European Conference will take place on July 5 — July 8, 2006, in Warsaw, Poland. There will be three round tables:

Police state in the process of system transition in postcommunist countries
Belarus – future of the society, nation and state
EU eastern policy – enlargement, partnership, borders, cooperation

In order to […]

The poster says in Polish: “For new Belarus! Spring 2006. Solidarity of Europe is living in the hearts of the Belarusian people.”
Belarusians in Poland staged a small protest in front of the Belarus’ embassy in Warsaw, today. Before demonstrating in front of the Belarus embassy they delivered petitions to some of the Western European embassies […]

In the last three days there were some pretty good news for our main opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich:
1. Council of Europe
Milinkevich was invited to PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) where he delivered a good solid speech to the members of the assembly.
(Milinkevich in French: ) “Can the election be free in […]

Today I got an email from Jan Malicki, a chairman of Eastern European studies program in Warsaw University. He writes that Warsaw University is going to grant 20 scholarships to graduate students from Belarus and Ukraine, to study politology for one year (from March till December, 2006). The deadline for applications is January 20, […]

It seems no one cares about that guy, so I feel obliged to write about his case again, to give him just a little bit more exposure, though I don’t have such a big audience (probably, about 100-200 readers). The latest news is that Zmicier Pimenau is still in jail and he began another hunger […]

Telegraph: “The nightmare of nuclear war in Europe - a spectre that haunted the world for half a century - stood revealed yesterday in terrible detail.
In a historic break with the past, Poland’s newly elected government threw open its top secret Warsaw Pact military archives - including a 1979 map revealing the Soviet bloc’s vision […]