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Peter Benenson, founder of the Amnesty International organization died -
01/03/2004
Peter Benenson, the founder of the worldwide human rights organisation Amnesty International, died on the 25-th day of February aged 83 in the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford after a long illness.
"Peter Benenson’s life was a courageous testament to his visionary commitment to fight injustice around the world," said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
"He brought light into the darkness of prisons, the horror of torture chambers and tragedy of death camps around the world. This was a man whose conscience shone in a cruel and terrifying world, who believed in the power of ordinary people to bring about extraordinary change and, by creating Amnesty International, he gave each of us the opportunity to make a difference."
In 1961 Peter Benenson, a British Lawyer, was outraged to read about two Portugese students who were sentenced to seven years in jail for rising their glasses in a toast to freedom. He wrote an article for the London Observer, launching a one-year campaign called “Appeal for Amnesty, 1961.?
"Open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a story from somewhere of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions are unacceptable to his government...The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something effective could be done."
In the first few years of Amnesty International's existence, Mr Benenson supplied much of the funding for the movement, went on research missions and was involved in all aspects of the organisation's affairs.
Mr Benenson was involved in a range of activities during his lifetime: from adopting orphans from the Spanish Civil War to establishing a society for people with coeliac disease.
Today Amnesty International is into its 44th year. It has become the world’s largest independent human rights organisation, with nearly 2 million members and committed supporters worldwide.
Speaking on Amnesty's 40th anniversary, Mr Benenson paid tribute to the organisation's "many victories", but he went on to warn: "The challenges are still great. Only when the last prisoner of conscience has been freed, when the last torture chamber has been closed, when the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a reality for the world's people, will our work be done."
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Lukashenka Takes Off Hat to Felix Dzerzhinsky-
08/10/2004
The Belarusians? attitude to the achievements of our predecessors have always been respectful, and no matter how hard the political demagogues had been trying to cross out the Soviet past from our history, the nation has prevented it. It was said by president Lukashenka at the ceremony of reopening a memorial complex in honor of Felix Dzerzhinsky in Dzerzhinovo, in Staubtsy district, Minsk region.
As said by the head of state, monuments were not destroyed and streets were not renamed in Belarus. The bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, as before, is situated in the center of Minsk, and one of the avenues of the Belarusian capital, and a town in Minsk region continue to bear the name of the founder of the first secret police in Soviet Russia (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage).
At present historians and citizens assess Felix Dzerzhinsky’s activities with at least mixed feelings. However, Alexander Lukashenka, whose regime has much in common with Dzerzhinsky's one, seem not being interested in these feelings.
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Belarus Jews complain of rising anti-Semitism
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26/07/2004
A leading Jewish group in Belarus on Saturday accused the government of turning a blind eye to a rising tide of anti-Semitism in the ex-Soviet republic. Conditions for Jews in Belarus "differ little from the situation in the former Soviet Union," Yakov Basin, head of the Belarusian office of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, said in a statement.
He urged international organizations to respond to the spread of anti-Semitism in Belarus and help protect rights of the Belarusian Jews.
Jewish groups in Belarus have repeatedly complained of anti-Semitism, manifested by the appearance of swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti, vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, the open sale of anti-Semitic publications, and the closing down of the sole university in Belarus that taught Jewish studies. In the capital Minsk and the city of Lida near the border with Poland vandals have defiled monuments to Jews killed during World War II.
The government of Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has failed to respond to anti-Semitic actions, Basin said. He added that Belarus` Orthodox Church helps encourage anti-Semitism by defaming Jews in its official publications.
Some 25,000 Jews currently live in Belarus, a mostly Slavic nation of 10 million that was home to a substantial Jewish minority before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Some 800,000 Jews were killed in Belarus by the Nazis, and many left the country after the 1991 Soviet collapse.
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