“Charnobyl Way” organizers lodge application to Minsk city executive committee

On April 26 the Belarusian opposition plans to hold a traditional rally commemorating the catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

“We have filed an application to Minsk city executive committee. We ask to authorize a demonstration on one lane of Surhanau Street,” said Yury Khadyka, chairman of “Charnobyl Way” organizing committee at a press-conference on Tuesday.

In accordance to the application filed on April 10, organizers plan that participants gather near the building of the Academy of Science. Then it is planned that they are going to march along Independence Avenu and Surhanau Street, up to the Friendship of Nations’ Park, where the meeting will be held.  The event is to be finished by laying flowers to Charnobyl Chapel, situated near the church in honour of the icon of Our Lady Seeking of the lost. The application has been sent from individual persons. It is supposed that up to 1,000 persons are going to take part in the rally, Interfax reports.

“We have also asked in our application to order the Internal Affairs Department of Minsk not to detain our sound amplifying equipment, in case the meeting is authorized,” Yury Khadyka said, expressing a hope that the rally would be authorized by the authorities.

As it had been stated at the press-conference by the organizers of the event, Charnobyl Way has an aim to remind the authorities of Belarus and the entire Belarusian society about the problems caused by Charnobyl disaster, and also to pose questions related to construction of a nuclear power plant in the country. In this connection one of the organizers of the event, the chairman of the Belarusian Popular Front party Alyaksei Yanukevich stated: “We are going to say “no” to a Russian nuclear power plant.” He explained that the Belarusian-Russian agreement on construction of a Belarusian nuclear power plant “would make the country even more dependent on the Kremlin in terms of energetics.”

As the organizers plan, a declaration on necessity to release and rehabilitate political prisoners would be adopted during the rally.