The Russian NGO Memorial, which is banned in Russia, denounced the trial it had to undergo on Friday, while the “whole world” congratulated it on the Nobel Peace Prize.
“While the whole world congratulates us on the Nobel Prize, a trial is underway at the Tverskoi Court (in Moscow) to seize the Memorial buildings”denounced the human rights center of this organization, a reference in the struggle for freedom and for the memory of political oppression in Russia and the Soviet Union.
Hours after the announcement of the Nobel Committee, a court in Moscow decided to seize the headquarters of the Russian NGO. The Tverskoi court has ordered that the headquarters of the NGO Memorial in Moscow “should be state-owned,” Interfax reported.
In court, the prosecution accused the NGO Memorial of “rehabilitating Nazi criminals, discrediting the authorities and creating a false image of the USSR”.
Russian authorities have portrayed Memorial as an organization that tarnishes the country’s past.
The NGO has spent the past 30 years investigating the political repression of the Soviet regime up to 1991, and has denounced the human rights violations in Russia since the fall of the USSR.
In December 2021, Russian courts banned the organization for creating a “false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state” and for deliberately concealing information about its role as a foreign agent, as well as for “justifying extremism and terrorism.” “.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize to the arrested Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski and human rights groups Memorial, from Russia, and Center for Civil Liberties, from Ukraine.
Memorial, the conscience of Russia banned by Putin
The emblematic Russian NGO Memorial, one of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize this Friday (7), documented for three decades the purges of the Stalinist era and, later, the suppression of modern-day Russia by Vladimir Putin, from which the organization itself became a victim.
Last winter, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Memorial for violating a controversial “foreign agents” law, a decision that sparked an avalanche of convictions.
The liquidation of this organization, which became a symbol of democratization in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, took place weeks before the offensive in Ukraine.
Since then, the Kremlin’s military campaign has continued to suppress critical voices, with thousands of fines and hefty prison terms.
Hours after Nobel’s announcement, a Moscow court ordered an operation at the NGO’s offices in the capital.
Founded in 1989, Memorial continued to attract the attention of the authorities, earning the enmity of countless of them and falling victim to reprisals that even led to murder.
The organization, founded by Soviet dissidents, including Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, has been respected for its rigorous investigation of Stalinist crimes, abuses in Chechnya and abuses committed by Russian paramilitaries in Syria.
At the same time, Memorial drew up a list of political prisoners to whom it provided assistance, as well as migrants and persons of sexual minorities. One of the founders, Lev Ponomarev, said he was honored by the award but would have preferred it to have gone to Russian political prisoners.
Memorial said the Nobel Peace Prize has given it “moral strength” in “depressing times” after the organization’s liquidation in Russia and the military offensive in Ukraine.
“This award gives moral strength to all Russian human rights defenders,” said Memorial International President Yan Rachinsky. “Being with other compatriots, like Andrei [Sakharov], [Mikhail] Gorbachev and Dmitri Muratov is very important in these depressing times,” he added, referring to former Russian Nobel laureates.
“We must not forget those who are in prison,” Rachinski added, citing in particular imprisoned opponents Alexei Navalny and Ilia Yachin, two Russian opposition figures.
‘Enemies of the people’
In the two conflicts in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000, Memorial employees were on the scene and documented abuse by Russian soldiers. “Power has always hated that,” historian Irina Shcherbakova, one of the founders, told AFP in November.
In 2009, the head of the NGO in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova, was kidnapped and executed in Grozny. Authoritarian Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov was charged with this murder, calling Memorial members “enemies of the people”.
In the 1960s and 1970s, before Memorial was officially established, dissident militants began clandestinely gathering information to identify the millions of forgotten victims of Soviet repression.
With the opening promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the last stretch of the USSR, they began to do this without hiding.
But, with the arrival of Putin in 2000, that task became more complicated as the Kremlin championed a historical interpretation that emphasizes Russian power and minimizes Soviet crimes.
During the NGO’s dissolution process, prosecutor Alexei Yafiarov accused Memorial of “creating a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state” and of trying to “rehabilitate Nazi criminals”.
The NGO denounced other processes to silence it.
“What is happening now is not comparable to what could have happened before. […]a country that has left the totalitarian system is ready to return to it,” said Oleg Orlov, one of Memorial’s historical leaders, admitting that “he has not experienced a darker period in all his life.”
News updated on 21.13
Source: DN
