We Have Lilac Blossom, They Have Air Alerts

• Iryna Khalip
• 5.05.2023, 15:27

Farewell, the red calendar day.

For the second year in a row, I will mark Victory Day on May 8. Simply because it is shameful to join dictators and impostors in celebrating the holiday, as one of whom bombs Ukraine, and the other supports him in every possible way and provides all rear support to the aggressor. May 9 is no longer a holiday. Farewell, the red calendar day.

Once upon a time, my classmate Dinka and I always met on May 9 in the park near the Kupala Theater, bought armfuls of flowers and went to give them to unfamiliar veterans walking along the avenue. Then, in the late eighties, there were still a lot of them. Veterans sincerely rejoiced, accepting flowers from unfamiliar young students, and valiantly clicked their heels. We always had a wonderful and a little sentimental mood that day. We wandered around the festive city until the fireworks.

Then the regime usurped not only power, but also holidays. Two years ago, when it became known that the state was going to cancel holiday payments for veterans, the Belarusians decided to raise money for them and congratulate them. By that time Belarusian solidarity had become legendary. And Lukashenka shouted from a high podium: there is no need to collect money for our veterans, because they will not take money from the oppositionists who march under Nazi flags anyway, because this is bloody money, we ourselves will congratulate them, so much so that everyone will envy. And the congratulations were expired products and pompous words.

And since last year, this is generally someone else's holiday. Not ours, not national, not human. They took it away, smeared it in Ukrainian blood, gutted it to the state of an empty empty shell. As empty as the words they speak. And the salute looks like a crime at all, because the roar and flashes in the sky are exactly what can happen in Ukraine at the same moment, again taking someone's life. Close the window so as not to hear, curtain it tightly so as not to see, do not leave the house that day even to buy bread, so as not to die of disgust. Here we are in May. Not festive at all.

May for me now is the very month when Vitold Ashurak died in prison. The month when Stanislau Shushkevich, the first leader of independent Belarus, died, never seeing the freedom of his country. The month when Siarhei Tsikhanouski and Mikalai Statkevich were arrested. The month when my friends Yauhen Afnahel, Pavel Seviarynets, Maksim Viniarsky, Andrey Voynich, Pavel Yukhnevich were sent to jail for 5-7 years. Month of trials of Stsiapan Latypau, Zinaida Mikhnyuk, Marfa Rabkova. The month when the REP trade union and the Knigauka store were arrested.

And May is also the forced landing of a Ryanair aircraft, when a fighter jet took off in front of the eyes of the whole world to intercept a low-cost airline that was carrying vacationers from Greece to Lithuania. This is the skies of Belarus closed for flights, this is the break of the last ties of our country with the civilized world. This is the massacre of the Tut.by portal and the arrest of its employees. These are deserted cities, along the streets of which it has become dangerous to walk in white and red clothes, and in any other, too. These are correspondence and photographs deleted from phones. It is the fear of any doorbell. These are hasty packing and overcrowded trains to Moscow, because it was safer to leave from there.

And, of course, May is the end of the defense of Azovstal, the capture of its defenders-heroes and their removal to the colony in Yelenivka, where many of them later died in an explosion. May is the ruins of Mariupol. By the way, it was in Mariupol in the late eighties that the most perestroika film of that time, Little Vera, was filmed: director Vasily Pichul was born there. He died in 2015 and does not know what his hometown has become. So May is Mariupol forever.

And the lilac blossomed, as if nothing had changed. We have lilac. Ukrainians have air raids. Another air raid. And how the hell can anyone celebrate victory when there's war going on?

Iryna Khalip, specially for Charter97.org