OSLO - A trio representing the three nations at the centre of the war in Ukraine accepted their Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, calling for the fight to continue unabated against Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s “insane and criminal” invasion.
Jailed Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties were honoured by the Nobel committee for their struggle for “human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence” in the face of authoritarianism.
The world’s most prestigious prize for peace efforts has in no way weakened the trio’s resolve to stand up and fight.
“The people of Ukraine want peace more than anyone else in the world. But peace cannot be reached by a country under attack laying down its arms,” the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, Ms Oleksandra Matviichuk, said.
Founded in 2007, the centre has documented war crimes allegedly committed by Russian troops in Ukraine for the past eight years, including shelling of residential buildings, churches, schools and hospitals, bombings of evacuation corridors, forced displacement of people, and torture.
In the nine months since the start of the Russian invasion, the centre has documented more than 27,000 cases of alleged war crimes that Ms Matviichuk said were “only the tip of the iceberg”.
“War turns people into numbers. We have to reclaim the names of all victims of war crimes,” she said in her speech, her voice overcome with emotion.
In Oslo’s City Hall, decorated with red Siberian flowers, Ms Matviichuk reiterated her appeal for an international tribunal to judge Mr Putin, his ally, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, and “other war criminals”.
Her Russian co-laureate Yan Rachinsky, chairman of Memorial, denounced Russia’s “imperial ambitions” inherited from the former Soviet Union “that still thrive today”.
Mr Putin and his “ideological servants” have hijacked the anti-fascist struggle “for their own political interests”, he said.
Now, “resistance to Russia is called fascism”, and has become “the ideological justification for the insane and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine”, he said, using harsh language.
Moscow imposes stiff penalties on those who publicly criticise the invasion.
Founded in 1989, Memorial has for decades shed light on crimes committed by Josef Stalin’s totalitarian regime, worked to preserve the memory of the victims, and documented human rights violations in Russia.
Amid crackdowns on the opposition and media, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered Memorial dissolved at the end of 2021, and ordered a raid of its Moscow offices on Oct 7 – the very day it was announced as the co-winner of this year’s Peace Prize.
“Today, the number of political prisoners in Russia is more than the total number in all of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the period of perestroika in the 1980s,” Mr Rachinsky said, referring to the political movement for reform within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The third co-laureate, Mr Bialiatski, founder of rights group Viasna, has been detained since July 2020 pending trial, following Minsk’s crackdown on large-scale protests against the regime.
The 60-year-old was not authorised to transmit an acceptance speech for the Nobel ceremony.
Instead, his wife, Ms Natalia Pinchuk, who accepted the award on his behalf, shared some of his thoughts, recorded earlier, including a call to fight against “the international of dictatorships”.
In Ukraine, Russia is trying to establish “a dependent dictatorship”, he said, quoted by his wife.
“The same as today’s Belarus, where the voice of the oppressed people is ignored and disregarded,” he said, citing “Russian military bases, huge economic dependence, and cultural and linguistic russification”.
“Goodness and truth must be able to protect themselves,” he said. AFP
