MINSK, 23 February (BelTA) - The Prosecutor General's Office has submitted a proposal to the Council of Ministers to nominate the Brest Hero Fortress memorial complex for the inclusion into the UNESCO World Heritage List, BelTA learned from the Department of Media Relations and Editorial Activities at the Prosecutor General's Office of Belarus.
As it was noted, this issue has been discussed for several decades. UNESCO experts visited Belarus for this purpose in 2003. In 2004, Belarus nominated the citadel as a cross-border fortification of the 19th - early 20th centuries. After that, the historical and cultural site was added to the UNESCO Tentative List. It was removed from the list in 2016-2017 over the presence of monuments of the Great Patriotic War on the grounds of the fortress.
"Until 2021 there was a moratorium on the inclusion of objects related to the military history. At the same time, there was an exception to this rule - the buildings and structures of the former Auschwitz concentration camp," the Prosecutor General's Office noted.
In 2020, when the moratorium was still in effect, the Brest regional administration and the Culture Ministry, when preparing the Culture of Belarus 2021-2025 program, also explored a proposal to include Brest Fortress in the UNESCO List not as an object of the Great Patriotic War but as a defensive structure of the Russian Empire of the 19th-20th centuries.
"The deadline for the preparation of the nomination file was delayed to 2025. The nomination procedure can take several years," the Prosecutor General's Office said.
Taking into account the special state importance of the investigation of the criminal case on the genocide of the Belarusian people, the Prosecutor General's Office proposed to nominate Brest Fortress not as a fort of the 19th century, but as a memorial to the Great Patriotic War, symbolizing the protection of the world from Nazism and the fight against the policy of genocide against unleashed against the Belarusian people.
