In a highly symbolic choice in favor of “peaceful coexistence”, the Nobel Peace Prize winner on Friday crowned a trio of civil society representatives in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, three of the main players in the Ukrainian conflict.
The award was jointly awarded to Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, still in prison in his country, to the Russian NGO Memorial – hit by a dissolution order from the Russian authorities – and to the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.
“The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honor three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence in the three neighboring countries of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine”, declared its president Berit Reiss-Andersen.
In doing so, the Nobel Committee, as expected by the experts, wanted to mark the blow in the face of the war in Ukraine which plunged Europe into the most serious security crisis since the Second World War.
But the five members of the Nobel committee were careful not to directly criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had launched the invasion of his Ukrainian neighbor on February 24.
Asked whether it was a poisoned gift for the strongman of the Kremlin who is celebrating his 70th birthday today, Ms Reiss-Andersen said that this award was not directed against Mr Putin but that his “authoritarian” regime, like that of Belarus, had to stop repressing human rights activists.
“This prize is not for Vladimir Putin, neither for his birthday nor in any other sense, except that his government, like the Belarusian government, is an authoritarian government that suppresses human rights activists,” she said. to be worth.
She also urged Belarus to release Ales Bialiatski, founding president of the Viasna (“Spring”) Human Rights Center, who was imprisoned again in 2020 during massive protests against re-election, deemed fraudulent. by Westerners, of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Bringing together tens of thousands of demonstrators for months, the protest movement linked to the presidential election was harshly put down: mass arrests – at least 37,000 according to the UN -, torture, forced exile and imprisonment of opponents, journalists and NGO leaders…
Supported at the time by Russia, Mr. Lukashenko, who clings to power since 1994, has today made his country one of the very few allies of Russia in its offensive against Ukraine.
Nuclear threat
Beyond the destruction and countless deaths on Ukrainian soil, the Russian invasion has created the most serious tensions in Europe since World War II and raised the specter of a nuclear strike.
No less than 343 candidates were in the running this year for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Peace Prize crowned two champions of freedom of the press and information last year, Filipino journalist Maria Ressa and her Russian colleague Dmitry Muratov.
It is the only Nobel to be awarded in Oslo, the other disciplines being awarded in Stockholm.
On Monday, the Nobel Prize for Medicine opened the ball by crowning the Swede Svante Pääbo, father of Denisova’s man and discoverer of the DNA of Neanderthal man.
That of physics rewarded Tuesday the Frenchman Alain Aspect, the Austrian Anton Zeilinger and the American John Clauser for their discoveries on the revolutionary mechanism of “quantum entanglement”, proving wrong on this improbable phenomenon of quantum mechanics to Albert Einstein himself.
On Wednesday, a trio, the Americans Carolyn Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless jointly with the Dane Morten Meldal, were crowned in chemistry for “the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”.
And Thursday, Annie Ernaux, author in particular of “Empty cabinets” and “The years”, became the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, after 15 men.
The Nobel season will end next Monday with the economics prize, added in 1969 to the five traditional prizes provided for in Alfred Nobel’s will.