OSLO: A trio from the three countries at the heart of the war in Ukraine accepted their Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, calling for an unrelenting fight against Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s “insane and criminal” invasion.
Jailed Belarusian rights lawyer Iles Byatsky, Russian organization Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) have been honored by the Nobel Committee for their struggle for “human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence” against authoritarianism. Nawaz.
CCL head Oleksandra Matvychik said that the people of Ukraine want peace more than anyone else in the world. “But an aggressor country cannot reach peace by surrendering.”
Founded in 2007, CCL has documented war crimes allegedly committed by Russian troops in Ukraine.
These include shelling of residential buildings, churches, schools, and hospitals, bombing of evacuation routes, forced displacement of people, and violence.
He told JEE News that due to Russian bombing of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Matvychik had to write his Nobel acceptance speech by candlelight.
In the nine months since the start of the Russian invasion, the CCL has documented more than 27,000 cases of alleged war crimes, which it says were “just the tip of the iceberg.”
“War turns people into numbers. We have to reclaim the names of all victims of war crimes,” he said in his speech, his voice overcome with emotion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy congratulated Matviichuk, CCL “and all human rights defenders”, noting that the event was held on International Human Rights Day.
Putin’s ‘Imperial Ambitions’
Adorned with red Siberian flowers at Oslo’s city hall, Matvichak reiterated his appeal for the international tribunal to try Putin, his ally Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and “other war criminals”.
His Russian co-laureate, the chairman of the human rights organization Memorial, Yan Rachinsky, meanwhile, condemned Russia’s “imperial ambitions” inherited from the former Soviet Union “that are still flourishing today”.
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 it has become the “ideological justification for the insane and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine,” he said, noting the harsh measures imposed by Moscow on those people. Strong language is used in consideration of punishments for those who publicly criticize. attack
Established in 1989, the memorial highlighted the crimes committed by Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime for decades, worked to preserve the memory of the victims, and documented human rights abuses in Russia.
Amid a crackdown on the opposition and the media, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the memorial to be dismantled at the end of 2021.
He then ordered a raid on his Moscow offices on October 7 — the day he was announced as a co-winner of that year’s peace prize.
“Today, the number of political prisoners in Russia exceeds the total number of all Soviet Unions at the beginning of the perestroika era in the 1980s,” Rechinsky said, referring to the Soviet-era term for the restructuring policy. Reform of the economic and political system.
‘International of Dictatorship’
A third Nobel laureate, Alice Biyatsky, founder of the rights group Vyasna, has been detained in Belarus pending trial since July 2021 following Minsk’s crackdown on mass anti-government protests.
The 60-year-old was not authorized to deliver his acceptance speech for the Nobel ceremony.
Instead, his wife Natalya Pinchuk, who accepted the award on his behalf, shared some of his thoughts, previously recorded, including a call to fight against “dictatorship internationals”. .
In Ukraine, Russia is trying to establish “a dependent dictatorship,” he quoted his wife as saying.
“It’s like Belarus today, where the voices of the oppressed people are ignored and ignored”, he said, citing “Russian military bases, heavy economic dependence, (and) cultural and linguistic ties”.
He said that goodness and truth should be able to protect themselves.
Later on Saturday, a separate awards ceremony in Stockholm honored other Nobel Prize winners in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics.
Among the prize winners are France’s Anne Ernaux, who won the literature prize, Ben Bernanke, the former head of the US Federal Reserve, who won the economics prize, and Barry Sharples of the US, who won the chemistry prize for the second time.
Also present were the 2020 and 2021 laureates, when the Stockholm ceremonies were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A grand banquet was held in Stockholm City Hall in the evening for about 1500 guests, including the Royal Family of Norway.
