Resolution of the congress of Peasants and Workers of Baranavichy County

The following resolution was adopted at the congress in Baranavichy, about which we wrote in No. 1 of "Syn Biełarusa":

The Congress of Belarusian Peasants and Workers of Baranavichy County, on 4 May 1924, having heard the report of the members of the Belarusian Deputies' Club on their work in the Sejm and the Senate and on the position of the Belarusian cause in Poland, resolved:

Taking into account the situation being created in Poland for the Belarusian people, which shows itself in the fact that:

1) Belarusian lands are being handed out to settlers (osadniks), and not to the local land-poor and landless Belarusian peasantry,

2) Belarusian forests are being ruthlessly destroyed and shipped abroad, and even the Białowieża Forest has already been sold to foreigners, while next to nothing is being issued for the rebuilding of farms ruined by the war, and at the same time

3) unbearable taxes are being laid upon our peasantry, ruined by the war,

4) Belarusian schools are not permitted, and even those that already existed under the German occupation or under "Central Lithuania" are being closed, while at the same time Polish schools are being opened against the will of the people,

5) the Belarusian press is persecuted,

6) the Belarusian Orthodox Church is persecuted,

7) the Belarusian intelligentsia is admitted to almost no civic or state work, a considerable number have been deprived of citizenship and are sitting in prisons,

8) the Polish "kresy" administration treats our people with extraordinary arbitrariness,

9) the present local self-governments are a falsification of the voice of our people, and the draft of the new law on self-governments plainly aims at just such a falsification of the will of the Belarusian people —

the congress recognizes that only when the Belarusian lands lying within the borders of Poland win for themselves broad political autonomy, with their own separate Sejm — only then will it be possible to put in order the relations on Belarusian territory in Poland.