Rewarding peace to stop the war. This seems the logic of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian human rights organization Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights association Center for Civil Liberties: three campaigns for democracy and freedom, which have bravely fought against the Kremlin autocracy and the Minsk autocrat.
The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, announced this morning at a press conference in Oslo, therefore goes to three joint winners.
The Belarusian activist
Baliatski, 60, is the founder of the Viasna (Spring) Human Rights Center, a center created in 1996 in response to the brutal repression of the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko, now Vladimir Putin’s supporter and partner in the invasion of Ukraine. The Belarusian activist is currently in detention awaiting trial in his country. His first arrest dates back to 2011, he was arrested again in 2020 after the mass protests against the scam elections that re-established Lukashenko in power. “He He dedicated his life to human rights and he didn’t give in an inch in his battle for him,” says the Nobel committee.
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The Russian NGO
Closed at the beginning of 2022 by Putin who accused it of being an anti-patriotic organization in the service of foreign powers, Memorial was for thirty years one of the main Russian humanitarian associations, dedicated – as its name suggests – to to preserve the memory and testimony of millions of innocent citizens who suffered first in the Gulag of the Soviet Union prison camps and then in the prisons of the current head of the Kremlin.
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The Kiev center for rights
Founded in 2007, the third Nobel laureate, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, has monitored political persecutions in Russian-occupied Crimea, documented war crimes after the Russian invasion of 2014 and last February still ongoing, reported massacres of civilians and rapes of women by the Moscow army in the offensive of the past seven months.
Taken together, they are “three champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence,” said Berit Reiss-Anderson, the chairman of the Nobel Committee, announcing the rationale for the award. “They honored a vision of peace and fraternity that is badly needed in today’s world,” she added, in a clear reference to the tragedy of the war in Ukraine and the threats of a nuclear escalation evoked by the Russian president in his recent speech. of him.
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As at other times in the past, the Nobel Peace Prize thus sends a signal to the world, reminding the brave who oppose tyranny and violence, at the risk of their freedom and their lives.
Recent winners of the award include Barack Obama, in 2009, for how his election to the White House represented a crucial step in defending racial equality in the United States, and in 2014 Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani activist seriously injured by the Taliban for her campaign for women’s right to education.
Closes Novaya Gazeta, the last free entry awarded with the Nobel
by our correspondent Rosalba Castelletti
A new prize for the Russians
In 2021 the award went to Dmitry Muratov, the editor of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta: today he and his newspaper have also become victims of Putin’s repression and censorship. The list of winners includes Nelson Mandela and Frederik De Klerk for fighting apartheid in South Africa, Israelis Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, together with Palestinian Yasser Arafat, for starting the peace process in the Middle East, and also the he last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose key role was recognized by the Nobel Prize in 1990 in the liberation of Eastern Europe and the democratization of the USSR.
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Today with Vladimir Putin it seems that history goes back to the darkest period of the Soviet Union, but the Nobel Prize reminds that there are still Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians fighting for peace and who need the support of the West to continue. and one day win their battle.