Oslo - “Peace cannot be reached by a country under attack laying down its arms,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, her voice trembling with emotion. “This would not be peace, but occupation.”
Oleksandra, one of this years Nobel Peace Prize winners, dismissed calls for a political compromise that would allow Russia to retain some of the illegally annexed Ukrainian territories, saying that “fighting for peace does not mean yielding to pressure of the aggressor, it means protecting people from its cruelty.”
Her visions were shared by co-winners of the 2022 peace prize from Belarus and Russia, each denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine during Saturday’s award ceremony in the Norwegian capital.
Russian human rights group Memorial and Ales Bialiatski, head of the Belarusian rights group Viasna, who is jailed in Belarus pending his trial and faces a prison sentence of up to 12 years, wasn’t allowed to send his speech. He shared a few thoughts when he met in jail with his wife, Natallia Pinchuk, who spoke on his behalf at the award ceremony.
“In my homeland, the entirety of Belarus is in a prison,” Bialiatski said in the remarks delivered by Pinchuk — in reference to a sweeping crackdown on the opposition after massive protests against an August 2020 fraud-tainted vote that Lukashenko used to extend his rule. “This award belongs to all my human rights defender friends, all civic activists, tens of thousands of Belarusians who have gone through beatings, torture, arrests, prison.”
Bialiatski is the fourth person in the 121-year history of the Nobel Prizes to receive the award while in prison or detention.
In the remarks delivered by his wife, he cast Lukashenko as a tool of Putin, saying the Russian leader is seeking to establish his domination across the ex-Soviet lands.
The triple peace prize award was seen as a strong rebuke to Putin, not only for his action in Ukraine but for the Kremlin’s crackdown on domestic opposition and its support for Lukashenko’s brutal repression of dissenters.
Russia’s Supreme Court shut down Memorial, one of Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organizations that was widely acclaimed for its studies of political repression in the Soviet Union, in December 2021.
Jan Rachinsky of Memorial said in his speech that “today’s sad state of civil society in Russia is a direct consequence of its unresolved past.”
He particularly denounced the Kremlin’s attempts to denigrate the history, statehood and independence of Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations, saying that it “became the ideological justification for the insane and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine.”
“One of the first victims of this madness was the historical memory of Russia itself,” Rachinsky said. “Now, the Russian mass media refer to the unprovoked armed invasion of a neighboring country, the annexation of territories, terror against civilians in the occupied areas, and war crimes as justified by the need to fight fascism.”
The Nobel prizes for chemistry, physics, medicine, literature and economics were presented later Saturday. After a two-year COVID-19 pandemic break, award ceremonies took place at Stockholm’s Concert Hall with nearly 1,500 invited guests.
-Ap