Big Daddy - Lukashenka, Tyrant of Belarus by John Sweeney

Author:John Sweeney [Sweeney, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silvertail Books
Published: 2012-07-28T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE: THE THIRD MAN

On the Saturday night I spent in Belarus we went to a bar in the centre of Minsk and watched the Eurovision Song Contest: a great wall of sound-dross hit our ears, Engelbert Humperdinck’s contribution an exception. It was grimly surreal to experience the silliness of 21st century Europe’s peace, the essential harmony of our continent, compared to previous generations, from a country where peace and harmony come at the price of intellectual submission to a killing machine. If you doubt that, consider the story of the Metro bomb.

At the dead centre of the centre of Belarus the cross-hairs of the two Metro lines that transect the capital Minsk meet. Here, outside October station, lies a shrine to a mass-murder that no-one dare question in public. On Monday, April 11, 2011 a bomb exploded in the Metro at four minutes to six: rush-hour, as one train arrived and a second made its way along the station’s island platform. Fifteen people died and more than one hundred were wounded when a TNT bomb packed with ball bearings, nails and shrapnel exploded, bringing down chunks of the granite roof and walls on the packed crowd. It was the worst terrorist outrage committed in Belarus since the end of the second world war.

Footage on YouTube shows something of the ghastly aftermath: candelabra glowing dimly through a saffron cloud of dust, blood-soaked faces limping away, grim officials struggling down the escalator which has been reduced to a bowl of metal spaghetti. And there’s footage of the great man himself, leading Little Kolya through the wreckage, while the dead lay unburied nearby. He was clearly unafraid that the terrorists who planted the bomb could have held back a second device to detonate once he was there – but no. His opponents say that, rather than bravery, it was as if he knew for a fact there would never be a second bomb.

Lukashenka ordered a thorough investigation into the bomb, calling for ‘results every day. Work day and night,’ Lukashenka told the Belarus security authorities. Lukashenka said: ‘We have been thrown a serious challenge. It requires an adequate response and it must be found. They will not let us have a peaceful life. I want to know - who… I would like to address the people honestly and openly. Without you it will be difficult for us to find these monsters.’

Early in the hours of the next morning, Tuesday, April 12, Moscow time, the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS reported the results of the immediate investigation by the Minsk authorities ordered by the President and the Minister of the Interior, Anatoly Kuleshov. The news agency said the investigators found the power of the explosion at the October station ranged from five to seven kilograms of TNT and the explosion crater was around 80 centimetres or two and a half feet wide. This is not rocket science. Bomb squads around the world have a simple rule of thumb: you measure the crater and can deduce the size of the explosive from it.

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