The director of the Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian organization that has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, defended today, together with a Belarusian activist and a Russian NGO, that peace in Ukraine cannot be achieved by laying down arms.
“The people of Ukraine want peace more than anyone else in the world,” Oleksandra Matviichuk said in her speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway.
On the other hand, he defended that “peace for an attacked country cannot be achieved by laying down arms”.
“That would not be peace, but occupation,” emphasized the director of the Center for Civil Liberties (CLC).
Established in 2007, the CLC now documents war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine: the destruction of residential buildings, churches, schools and hospitals, bombing of evacuation corridors, forced displacement of the population, torture and crimes.
As a result of the bombing of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Oleksandra Matviichuk was forced to write her Nobel Prize speech by candlelight, she told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in an interview just before the ceremony.
In nine months of Russian invasion, the CLC counted “more than 27,000 episodes” of war crimes, Matviichuk reported, adding that this was “just the tip of the iceberg.”
“War turns people into numbers. We must name all the victims of war crimes,” defended the Nobel Prize.
In her speech, the activist also took the opportunity to call for the creation of an international court to try the Russian president, his allies and “other war criminals”.
The issue of the Russian war in Ukraine was transversal in the speeches of the three laureates, who took the opportunity to call on the world not to lay down arms against Vladimir Putin’s “insane and criminal” war.
The Russian laureate, the chairman of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Memorial, Ian Ratchinski, denounced the “imperial aspirations” inherited from the former Soviet Union, which are “still thriving”.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia deduced the historical significance of the anti-fascist struggle “for its own political interests,” the official said.
Now, “opposing Russia is the same as fascism,” he lamented.
A distortion that “provides an ideological justification for the insane and criminal offensive war against Ukraine,” he said, despite Moscow’s ban on public criticism of the invasion.
Founded in 1989, Memorial has worked for decades to clear up crimes committed under Stalin’s totalitarian regime and preserve the memory of the victims, then collect information about the violation of freedoms and rights in Russia.
In a context of opposition and media muzzles, the NGO was dissolved in late 2021 by a Russian court, which also ordered the seizure of its Moscow offices on October 7, the same night the Nobel Prize was awarded. assigned to the organization.
The third winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Belarusian Ales Beliatski, founder of the human rights NGO Viasna, has been imprisoned since July 2021.
While awaiting trial, which could face a 12-year prison sentence for “smuggling” money to oppose Lukashenko’s repressive regime, the 60-year-old activist was barred from giving a Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
His wife Natalia Pintchouk, who represented him at the ceremony, had to content herself with tears by repeating some of the activist’s words, including those in which he called on the world to rise up against “international dictatorships”.
In Ukraine, Russia intends to “establish a vassal dictatorship, just like 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 speech . woman’s voice. .
“Kindness and truth must be able to protect each other,” he added.
The three laureates, one for each of the countries involved in the conflict, were honored for their commitment to “human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence” in the face of authoritarian forces.
Source: DN
