Svitlana Tsikhanouskaya: “Tadevush Kastsiushka was born on this day. The United States, Poland, and France have been fighting for the right to call him their national hero. But Belarus has not. Although he fought for Belarusians’ right to be Belarusians.
Kastsiushka was one of the people at the dawn of the Belarusian national consciousness. But do you know how Kastsiushka is celebrated in Belarus? For example, there is a bridge in his honor in New York. Almost every town in Poland has a Kastsiushka street, and a Polish geographer even named Australia’s highest mountain after him. And what about Belarus? Almost nothing.
The reason must be that he fought against Russia, whom the regime’s official propaganda calls “brothers”. It must be that he valued national symbols, history, language, and culture – and the regime wants to replace them with the “Russian language”, the “union state” and the history of Belarus after 1941. The Lukashenka regime embodies everything Tadevush Kastsiushka fought against.
The regime is trying to erase from our history those who fought for the rights of Belarusians to live freely without being subjugated to Russia. In the same way they are trying to cross out not only Kastsiushka but also all Belarusian political prisoners and Lukashenka's opponents. The list is endless.
Will we preserve their memory? That depends on us. But I am convinced that dozens of monuments to Vasil Bykau, Ales Bialiatski, Vaclau Lastouski, and, of course, Andrei Tadevush Banaventura Kastsiushka will be erected in Belarus very soon”.
