Aleh Trusau: We shouldn’t pass Culture Code – it is very detrimental!

generation.by

A famous historian wrote an author’s variant of a new Belarusan law on culture. The variant of the state doesn’t satisfy him by many reasons.

Aleh Trusau, the head of the Tavarystva Belaruskaj Movy (TBM) (the Belarusan Language Society), the author of the first law on culture in the Soviet Union, historian joined the discussion about the results of the monitoring “Culture as the factor of development” – a shared research of scientists from the Center for European Transformation (CET) on the realization of the UNESCO Convention “On protection and support of the diversity of forms of cultural self-determination”.

Besides, a week ago the historian finished an authors’ variant of a new Belarusan law on culture – the corresponding Culture Code that can be passed in Belarus as soon as this year. In the talk with the “EuroBelarus” Information Service Aleh Trusau told why we can’t pass the state’s variant of the document in detail.

- I have been writing the author’s version of the new law for a month and the presentation will soon take place. But this is not the thing. The thing is that I am one of the authors of the first law on culture in the Soviet Union passed in BSSR Supreme Council and the idea of this law – for the first time in the Soviet Union – was elaborated by our commission and passed in the spring of 1991. Since it was the 1^st example in the USSR, it was also decided that the Moscow passes this law, too. I was presenting the law to the deputies; they liked it, and prepared a draft. But USSR was dissolved, whereas the law remained.

It was purely a Soviet law and this Sovietism is preserved in the Culture Code and I think we shouldn’t pass it – it is very detrimental! Since we have already made this mistake with the Education Code, so we shouldn’t repeat our mistake with the Culture Code. But we should never do it!

The other thing is that we need a new version of the law on culture. I tried to make an author’s version. It’s main detail is Belarusan language since language is an indicator of any culture. I would suggest throwing the word marginalization out from the monitoring. Marginals are those who are writing such documents in Russian, the representatives of the so-called “Russian World”. We are well aware what this “Russian World” did in Ukraine.

And that is why even our state, with all it russification, writes the law on culture in Belarusan. Why? Because it is impossible to do it in a different language. it is problematic even to translate it. I would even advice UNESCO to prepare two versions of the monitoring – a Belarusan and an English one – so that to demonstrate that we are not Russia. All the more that the Russian language in UNESCO is lower by number of speakers than Arabic, and that not even considering Chinese and Spanish.

photo by EuroBelarus Information Service

As to the main remarks about the document, religion was the biggest ban in the Soviet Union, so the authorities, the authors of the monitoring, and us threw away a huge aspect of culture – religion. We absolutely need to turn it back! Now it isn’t regulated in any way, while the law on religion doesn’t mention culture.

We also need to resolve the issue of recreation. We also need to pay attention to culture and tourism. Our big problem is that the law on tourism exists by itself and there is no culture in it, whereas the law on culture doesn’t mention tourism.

And, of course, the existence of the private sector is our problem, too. For example, in the Soviet times there used to be one union of writers and one union of designers. Now we have 2 unions of writers, but there is only one in the Code. We need to write down all the “unions” since it might turn that we have a lot of unions of writers, designers, and artists. Soviet tradition remained in the Code. We also should list private museums, theaters, film studios, libraries, and everything else.

photo by EuroBelarus Information Service

We need to put limitations on drugs, smoking, alcohol, and pornography propaganda in mass media, and on the use of foul language in some books. Europe was criticizing prophet Muhammad and got thousands of killed people because it.

Playing with permissiveness causes thousands of deaths. Any culture and any action cannot be uncontrolled. We know that the freedom of one person ends where the freedom of another person starts. As I have been saying already, I think we cannot promote foul language – our ancestors didn’t use it, I can prove it as a historian. Whereas by number of child pornography Belarus will soon take the first place in Europe, so we should write that we do not support these anti-cultural phenomena.

And as to the issue of funding, there used to be an obligatory 2% fund from the budget in the Soviet times, whereas the new authorities with Lukashenka as the leader cut this amount to 0.46%. So I suggest that if we want to get something we need to write down 2.5%.

By the way, all state programs are not being fulfilled to the full but only by 20-25%. So we need to get the note of 1991 back to the law on culture if we want to be a cultural nation and get state funding for education, medicine, and culture, while all the rest can go to the KGB and the Ministry of Internal Affaires.

If the culture gets only the residual money, there will be no culture whatever laws we pass.