Imprisoned since July 2021 in Belarus, Ales Bialiatski, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, has been with his organization Viasna (“Spring”) for decades the face of the defense of rights in an increasingly authoritarian country.
Mr. Bialiatski, 60, had been arrested for “tax evasion”, a case perceived as revenge for President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994 and who has muzzled any form of criticism with arrests or truncheons, since the vast movement of post-election protest in the summer of 2020 which shook his regime.
For weeks, tens of thousands of Belarusians, braving fear, took to the streets to protest against the re-election for a sixth term of the head of state. At their side, Viasna listed the arrests, accusations of torture in prison and the injured.
This is not Ales Bialiatski’s first time in prison or his first wave of repression.
His previous incarceration, for nearly three years, from 2011 to 2014, had also been orchestrated for tax reasons. His arrest then came a few months after a presidential election which had already given rise to severely repressed opposition demonstrations.
“Serial Repressions”
“During his 25 years of activism, Bialiatski has faced serial repressions,” noted the NGO Human Rights Watch last year when his name was already mentioned for the Nobel Peace Prize.
After putting down the demonstrations in the summer and fall of 2020, the Belarusian regime attacked the media and organizations deemed critical, imprisoning their leaders or simple activists for various reasons. Viasna and Bialiatski were no exception.
“Viasna’s brutal crackdown is only part of President Alexander Lukashenko’s purge of civil society,” Human Rights Watch noted at the time.
Founded in 1996 during massive pro-democracy protests in Belarus, a former Soviet republic then already ruled with an iron fist by Mr. Lukashenko, Viasna began its work by providing aid to incarcerated people and their relatives.
His work then extended to the defense of human rights in general, in a country where abuses are widespread in this area.
A member of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Viasna quickly became a key monitor of rights abuses, whether counting arrests during protests, defending political prisoners or monitoring elections.
“Sowing Fear”
Mr. Bialiatski, hair and short white beard, was one of the members of the “coordination council” set up by the Belarusian opposition last year to contest the re-election deemed fraudulent of Alexander Lukashenko and to try to force the power to compromise.
There, in this organization, he rubbed shoulders with the Nobel Prize for Literature Svetlana Alexievitch, who went into exile, or the figure of the opposition Maria Kolesnikova, recently sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Almost all of the members of this council have been imprisoned or driven into exile, while dozens of independent media and NGOs have been liquidated by court order.
Several members of Viasna are detained in various cases ranging from “disturbing public order” to “participation in a criminal organization”. Searches targeted in February and July 2021 more than 50 places linked to members of the organization.
“As much in the small towns as in the regional towns and the capital, there is real terror”, noted in an interview Ales Bialiatski in August 2020, a few days after the disputed re-election of Mr. Lukashenko.
“The objective is very simple: to retain power at all costs and to sow fear in society,” he predicted.