The BPF Party (; ) is a political party in Belarus. It was de facto established after the split of the social movement Belarusian Popular Front (abbr. BPF; , ) in 1999. The Belarusian Popular Front was founded during the Perestroika era by members of the Belarusian intelligentsia, including Vasil Bykaŭ. Its first and most charismatic leader was Zianon Pazniak. After a 2005 decree by president Alexander Lukashenko on the restriction of the usage of the words ("Belarusian") and ("National", "Popular", "People's") in the names of political parties and movements, the party had to change its official name to "BPF Party". Early history The Belarusian Popular Front was established in 1988 as both a political party and a cultural movement, following the examples of the Popular Front of Estonia, Popular Front of Latvia and the Lithuanian pro-democracy movement Sąjūdis. Membership was declared open to all Belarusian citizens as well as any democratic organization. Its alleged goals are democracy and independence through national rebirth and rebuilding after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The main idea of the Front was the revival of the national idea, including a revival of the Belarusian language. Initially, its orientation was pro-Western with a great deal of scepticism towards Russia. At one point they propagated the idea of a union from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea that would involve Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Lithuania, similar to Józef Piłsudski's Intermarium. The party was in favour of removing Russian as an official language in Belarus. Russian became an official language following the 1995 Belarusian referendum, at the beginning of Lukashenko's rule, when a proposal for making Russian a state language received 83.3% support from the turnout. Among the significant achievements of the Front was the uncovering of the burial site of Kurapaty near Minsk. The Front claims that the NKVD performed extrajudicial killings there. Initially, the Front had significant visibility because of its numerous public actions that almost always ended in clashes with police and KGB. It was BPF parliamentarians who convinced the Supreme Council of Belarus (the interim Belarusian parliament) to restore the historical Belarusian symbols: the white-red-white flag and the Pahonia coat of arms. During Soviet-times people faced arrest in the streets for displaying white-red-white symbols in Belarus. In 1994 the BPF formed a so-called "shadow" cabinet consisting of 100 BPF intellectuals. Its first Prime Minister was . It originally contained 18 commissions