On receiving their prestigious award on Saturday in Oslo, the Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize laureates called for not to lay down their arms in the “crazy and criminal” war that Vladimir Putin has launched in Ukraine.
Coming from the three main protagonist states of the conflict, the Belarusian activist Ales Beliatski, imprisoned in his country, the Russian NGO Memorial, dissolved by order of justice, and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) were crowned for their commitment in favor of “human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence” against authoritarian forces.
The Nobel didn’t dent their pugnacity – even though they didn’t show any signs of outpouring with each other during the award ceremony. “The people of Ukraine want peace more than anyone else in the world,” said the head of the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), Oleksandra Matviychuk. “But peace for a country under attack cannot be achieved by laying down arms. It would not be peace, but occupation,” she said.
“More than 27,000 episodes” of war crimes
Created in 2007, the CCL that she directs today documents the war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine: the destruction of apartment buildings, churches, schools and hospitals, the bombardments of evacuation corridors, forced population displacements, torture and crimes…
As a result of the bombings on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Matviychuk herself wrote her Nobel acceptance speech by candlelight, she told AFP in an interview just before the ceremony.
In nine months of Russian invasion, the CCL counted “more than 27,000 episodes” of war crimes, according to her, and this is “only the tip of the iceberg”. “War turns people into numbers. We must give a name to all the victims of war crimes,” she stressed.
Putin’s “imperial ambitions”
His voice choking with emotion in his speech at Oslo City Hall adorned with red Siberian flowers, Matviychuk again called for the creation of an international tribunal to try “Putin, (his ally, the Belarusian leader Alexander) Lukashenko and other war criminals”.
His Russian co-winner, the president of Memorial, Ian Ratchinski, for his part denounced the “imperial ambitions” inherited from the USSR which “still flourish today”. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has hijacked the historical meaning of the anti-fascist struggle “for the benefit of its own political interests”, he said. From now on, “resisting Russia is tantamount to fascism”, he lamented. A distortion that provides “the ideological justification for the mad and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine”, he said, despite Moscow’s bans on publicly criticizing the invasion.
The fate of political prisoners
Founded in 1989, Memorial has worked for decades to shed light on the crimes committed under Stalin’s totalitarian regime and preserve the memory of its victims, then to collect information on the violation of freedoms and rights in Russia. In a context of muzzling of the opposition and the media, the NGO was dissolved at the end of 2021 by the Russian justice, which also ordered the seizure of its offices in Moscow on October 7, the same evening of the awarding of the Nobel Prize. to the organization.
“Today, the number of political prisoners in Russia is greater than their total number in the entire Soviet Union at the start of the perestroika period in the 1980s,” Ratchinsky noted. The third Nobel laureate, Ales Beliatski, father of the human rights NGO Viasna, has been imprisoned since July 2021.
Awaiting a trial where he faces twelve years in prison for “smuggling” cash for the benefit of the opposition to the repressive regime of Lukashenko, the 60-year-old activist was not authorized to transmit a speech of thanks for the Nobel.
“Goodness and truth must be able to protect themselves”
The representative at the ceremony, his wife Natalia Pintchouk had to content himself with repeating a few of his words, in particular those in which he calls for standing up against “the international of dictatorships”. In Ukraine, Russia aims to establish “a vassal dictatorship, the same as today’s Belarus, where the voice of the oppressed people is ignored, with Russian military bases, huge economic dependence, cultural and linguistic Russification he said in his wife’s voice. “Goodness and truth must be able to protect themselves,” he also said.
In Stockholm, where the other Nobels are awarded (medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics), no less than 26 winners will take part in the festivities this year, including the French, the author Annie Ernaux. Blame it on Covid-19 which prevented the 2020 and 2021 winners from traveling to the Swedish capital to receive their reward and their check for 10 million crowns (around 900,000 euros).