# A Failed Attempt

- URL: https://syn.by/en/history/archives/a-failed-attempt/
- Published: 1924-06-13T20:00:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-10-23T21:03:26+00:00
- Section: Archives
- Language: en
- BE edition: https://syn.by/historya/arkhivy/niaudalaja-sproba.md
- RU edition: https://syn.by/ru/istoriya/arhivy/nyeudavshayasya-popytka.md

> The author holds that the initiative of Vilnia public figures to bring Belarusians and Poles closer together was doomed in advance: as long as nationalism rages in Poland and settlers (osadniks) attack Belarusian meetings, no cooperation is possible.

![](https://syn.by/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/illustration-2135-1024x585.webp)

The striving for mutual rapprochement between peoples who for one reason or another have to live under one state roof is perfectly understandable and, in normal circumstances, perfectly right. The enslaved peoples of tsarist Russia always showed such a striving. The same striving was shown recently by a group of Belarusian and Polish public figures who founded the Polish-Belarusian Society in Vilnia.

But what is natural in normal circumstances is quite impossible and unreal in the circumstances that the Polish state has created for the Belarusian population. And the very birth of the Polish-Belarusian Society, given the present Belarusian-Polish relations, immediately provoked a hostile attitude to this attempt both from the oppressed Belarusian masses and from the Polish public that rules over us.

Whoever remembers how the Polish side roughly wrecked an attempt at Belarusian-Polish cooperation on the ground of purely scholarly research (the affair of the "celi Konrada"), when the results of that research showed everyone the senseless abuse of scholarship for the dirty political aims of Polish nationalism, could not believe in the development of the Polish-Belarusian Society even within the narrowest bounds of activity. And so it has withered before it managed to bloom, before it was even able to open officially….

This is an important indicator of how far Belarusian-Polish relations have already been sharpened. And these relations, despite the stage-prop deliberations about the "sanation" of the question of Poland's "national minorities," grow sharper with every day, while the "masters of the situation," who so solemnly swear before their French "friends" that there is no "white terror" in Poland, at the same time devise and put into operation new methods of struggle, oppression and mockery against the "minorities."

From the interpellations of our deputies printed in this issue it is evident that not only are Belarusians, as of old, being deprived of the civil rights in Poland guaranteed by the Peace Treaties (see the interpellation in the matter of Haurylo Kostsevich), not only do officials of the administration who have already been formally brought to trial for torturing the population receive higher posts (see the interpellation in the matter of Kukheida), not only are political prisoners put in shackles without cause (see the interpellation in the matter of Deputy Baran) — but organized bands of armed military settlers are let loose to fight the Belarusian population and its elected members of the Sejm; with the knowledge and participation of the police they attack the deputies' meetings, threatening the "inviolable" Belarusian deputies (see the interpellation in the matter of the attack by the police and settlers in Pružany).

The last fact is all the more eloquent because it is not isolated: a similar fact of the violent breaking up of a Belarusian deputies' meeting, as we read in another interpellation of our Deputies' Club, took place on 8 May of this year in Daŭhinava, and the local authorities explained that the Starosta of Vilejka had been given the corresponding order by the Government Delegate in Vilnia.

The active appearance of military settlers in the struggle against the Belarusian population finally reveals all the behind-the-scenes combinations of the authors of the law on military settlement: now it is clear to everyone for what purposes hundreds and thousands of settlers were planted among us. And we must now recall that this force, hostile to our people, was created by the whole Polish majority of the Sejm, excluding neither the right nor the left!

It is clear that this is no time to seek an "understanding" even with the most democratic Polish groups — even if only on the ground of cultural rapprochement. The fury of wild nationalism, which has seized almost the whole Polish public, has not yet calmed in Poland. The nationalist reaction is not yet on the wane but, on the contrary, grows ever stronger. And at such a moment all attempts at rapprochement between the Belarusian and Polish public are fruitless and doomed in advance to failure: there can be no fraternization between a slave and his driver!