Interpellation on the police violence in Zhalezhnitsa

Of the deputies of the Belarusian Club to the Minister of Internal Affairs and to the Minister of Land Reforms, concerning the violence and lawless acts of the police commandant in Zhalezhnitsa, Navahrudak county.

After the abolition of serfdom, peasants who had no pasture of their own received the right to use the landlords' forests for grazing their cattle. Since Poland occupied the Belarusian lands, the landlords have been trying on their own authority to deprive our peasantry of its servitude rights, reducing the area of the servitude land, or even not admitting cattle to the servitude pasture at all. The Polish authorities, the police as well as the Land Offices, instead of carrying the land reform into life, actively help the landlord gentry to tear the servitude rights away from the peasants.

Now, the peasants of the village of Krepachy, Harodyshcha volost, Navahrudak county, have used since 1863 the servitude pasture in the tracts Vuskija, Pazhar, Bendry and Zalouki, which are in the joint possession of the peasants and of the landlords Shykavetski.

During the German occupation the Germans built at the entrance to Bendry a house for a station, which the Shykavetskis of Starynki have now taken for themselves. Later a barn and a fence were built there, and in this way the peasants' road to their servitude pasture of 23 desyatinas was cut off. When the peasants try to drive their cattle past the fence, the Shykavetskis try to prevent it, setting their dogs on the herdsmen and threatening to shoot.

On 4 June of this year Yazep and Mikalai Shykavetski and their servants, not letting through 2 herdsmen who were leading horses to the pasture, beat them so badly that one of them, Pilip Labuka, fell gravely ill. On 5 June the Shykavetskis brought the police commandant from Zhalezhnitsa to the village of Krepachy to deal with the peasants, and he forbade the peasants to graze their cattle on the servitude pasture, under threat of shooting from a revolver, which he held in his hand all the while. "You are forbidden to graze cattle, even if the pasture were yours!" the commandant declared. When the village elder began to explain to the commandant that the village could not renounce its servitude rights merely because a self-willed landlord wanted it, the commandant began to curse and threaten arrest: "Bydło! dam wam po 5 miesięcy, posadzę was sam, jak już to uczyniłem w Rajce" (Cattle! I will give you 5 months each, I will put you in jail myself, as I have already done in Rajka).

Besides this brutal handling of servitude matters by the head of public security, it must be added that the police commandant in Zhalezhnitsa torments the local population with demands for carts, which he makes not only when drunk but also when sober. Although the voit of the Harodyshcha gmina collected a compulsory tax from the peasants for the upkeep of the station, the unpaid requisition of carts continues: the Belarusian peasant has neither day nor night free from being forced to carry a policeman, an investigator, Polish teachers, the voit, his wife and others, thus establishing a new Polish serfdom.

On account of all the above, the interpellants ask the ministers: 1) Do they intend to protect the Belarusian peasants from the assaults of the landlords Shykavetski and of the police commandant? 2) Do they intend to secure for the peasants the use of their servitude pasture? 3) Do they intend to punish the police commandant for his arbitrary threats and orders? and 4) Do they intend to abolish the new serfdom, the supplying of carts by the peasants on every demand of the administration?

Signatures of the interpellants.

Warsaw, 20.VI.24.