On 23-24 July Belarusian emigrants from 21 countries participated in the two-day Congress of Belarusians of the World in Minsk.It was a rare occasion where top state and churches officials as well as opposition politicians attended the same event. Organisers of...
On 6 July Aliaksandr Lukashenka visited a celebration in his village of origin Aleksandryja in Mahilioŭ region. There he admitted that he very much looked forward to visiting his native land during his pressing schedule. “I travelled around the...
Strikes of entrepreneurs in Belarus dominated the public opinion over the last days. How the authorities reacted to the protests?Budzma`s ADNAK attracted a large crowd with its innovative award ceremony. The Council of Europe together with Belarusian authorities organised a round table on death penalty. Treci Sektar, a Belarusian NGO,...
Last week, the Board of Trustees of the Peace Prize of German Publishers and Booksellers Association have chosen the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich as the recipient of this year’s Peace Prize. In a subsequent interview with the German daily Frankfurter...
This April, the region of Paliessie in southern Belarus experienced annual flood caused by major local rivers. The flood was the largest in decades. Yet Paliessie is famous not only for floods that turn towns and villages into islands. The...
Appointing three new university rectors on 28 February, Alexander Lukashenka once again stated that there exists no problem with the Belarusian language at universities. Meanwhile, only 0.2 per cent of university students study in the Belarusian language, according to a recent...
Who constitutes a 'new majority'? What is the 'Civil Agreement on Change' about? - campaign Tell the Truth! presented its strategy for the next local and presidential elections. The civil society organised numerous educational opportunities and events for Belarusians. Among...
Belarusian civil society organised a number of discussion events on topics ranging from cancer to media wars. Other initiatives included the promotion of the Belarusian language and examining radioactive mushrooms. The Liberal Club attracted 100 practitioners to its event on...
In November 2012, the newly published Minsk underground system map surprised Minsk residents. On these maps, Belarusian names of the stations were transliterated into Belarusian using Latin script, or Lacinka. This transliteration seemed incomprehensible to many people and caused a...
Belarus is a unique country when it comes to Christmas: it has one Christmas at the end of December and the other one in early January. Both are official days off. The Belarusian state officially recognises two confessions - the...
The Belarusian authorities trade the national identity of Belarusians in exchange for economic subsidies from Russia. Constitutional guarantees of equal rights of the two official languages actually do not work. The majority of Belarusians react indifferently to that fact, as...
Belarusian analysts discuss the role of language in Belarusian society, media barometer, abolition of death penalty, European and Eurasion integration among other topics. Language of Democracy and Language of Dictatorship – brief but probably the most popular article of the week...
In Belarus, being an academic means that you work in an institution controlled by the state. Sometimes you cannot be a true scholar because you have to produce the "official truth". Otherwise you risk being repressed for disloyalty. A good...
Official population censuses in Belarus conducted in 1989, 1999 and 2009 reveal a number of interesting trends. They show that the population is declining, the proportion of those who identify themselves as Belarusian is increasing and the role of the Belarusian language is weakening. The period of Lukashenka's...
