Vitsebsk region: Paulovichy could be burnt down after appeal to Lukashenka
At a special briefing held after the
demolition of the village of Paulovichy, the chairman of the Vitsebsk
City Executive Committee Viktar
Mikalaikin solemnly
stated the journalists of the government owned media that all the
residents of the village received apartments in the city in exchange
for their houses. And compensations were added to that. That is why
the noise around the topic was redundant.
A resident of the
burnt Paulovichy village Alena
Karavina told Euroradio
that “her family indeed received an apartment. But only 5-6
dwellers of not a very small village received the
compensation”.
“People were given apartments in exchange.
But some people received apartments which did not correspond to the
houses that were taken away. From all the 34 houses of the village
only 5-6 people received the compensations”, the woman says.
In the distant 1992 Paulovichy was not destroyed completely. Money
was not found for the heating plant planned on the site. Ten houses
remained there which were bought from the state by former residents.
But they did not succeed in getting back the land. The officials
claimed that they would allow to do that if the people returned the
city the apartments that they had received.
People in
Paulovichy have lived in a non-existent village for twenty years more
or less peacefully up until 1 December 2012, when they found out that
their property is about to be burnt. They had two days to pack and
leave. Another Paulovichy dweller Alena
Holubeva
says that she did not manage to save the valuable real estate:
“We
took what we needed from the house. But we did not manage to do the
same with the garages. We had two big brick garages there. We wanted
to dismantle them for bricks, but were not allowed to do that”.
But
the most interesting question is why the Vitsebsk authorities decided
to deal shortly with the village on such a short notice when they did
not have any problems with it for the previous twenty years.
According to the official version a building of a tannery will start
here in spring, But there milk and meat processing factories very
near to Paulovichy. It is doubtful that anyone would allow building a
harmful chemical production enterprise here. That is why part of the
residents believe that a favorable location of the village could
interest someone of the local or Russian businessmen which wanted to
build something here.
However, yet another version is
considered the most probable. Alena Holubeva assumes that process was
sped up by the residents themselves, when they wrote about their
problem to Lukashenka’s administration:
“It is hard to
answer this question. But I think that such a rapid annihilation of
the village is connected to our appeal to the president’s
administration. We asked to sort out the situation, our issue.
Nothing has been built on this land for twenty years and we asked to
give us the land for use in order for everything to be legal”.
It is quite probable that someone in the Vitsebsk CEC found out
about the letter of the villagers and decided to literally wipe
Paulovichy out of the map. If there is no village – there is no
problem. Especially in the context of the coming visit of Lukashenka
to Vitsebsk. What if someone asks him about the village…
