Belarus throws a Nobel winner in prison
Eugene Chudnovsky
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On Friday, a court in Belarus handed down a 10-year prison term to Ales Bialiatski, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. Bialiatski, 60, is a founder of the Viasna (Spring) Human Rights Centre that has been monitoring presidential elections and aiding political prisoners since 1996. He was imprisoned for funding political protests.
Bialiatski, who holds a doctorate in Belarusian literature, has participated in the pro-democracy movement since the early 1980s. In the 1990s, he was a director of the Literary Museum in Minsk that housed pro-democracy NGOs and published an independent newspaper. He was elected to the Minsk City Council and served as secretary and then deputy chairman of the Belarusian Popular Front. In 2003, the Supreme Court of Belarus declared Viasna illegal, but Belarus’s leading human rights center never stopped its activities. In 2011 Bialiatski was thrown in jail for four and a half years on trumped-up charges of tax evasion. A worldwide campaign on his behalf led to his release from prison in 2014. Until 2016, he served as vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights.
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Independent monitoring of the 2020 Belarus presidential elections led to new arrests and prosecutions. Viasna’s manager Marfa Rabkova was violently detained and thrown into prison. In July 2021, the homes of Viasna’s activists across the country were searched by security agents. Bialiatski and two co-workers were arrested.
Bialiatski was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize together with the Russian human rights organization Memorial (shut down by Moscow court in 2021) and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties. His trial this year followed an earlier trial of Belarusian political dissidents in September 2022, when Rabkova, 27, was sentenced to a 15-year prison term.
The draconian prison sentence for a world-renowned scholar and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate shows total neglect of public opinion by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. In that respect, he finds himself in the company of Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and other leaders who detain and imprison winners of the Nobel Peace Prize that stand against totalitarian rule in their countries.
In the 1980s, Russia harassed and kept in exile the winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, physicist Andrei Sakharov. In January of this year, the best-known Russian human rights organization Moscow Helsinki Group, founded by Sakharov, was shut down by the court. Last month, the Sakharov Center in Moscow, housing a unique collection of documents about Russian history, was also closed under the court order.
China kept its winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, writer and philosopher Liu Xiaobo (born in 1955), in prison until he was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2017 and died a few weeks later.
Iranian 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi received death threats and was repeatedly harassed by security agents. She was stripped of her law credentials and her Nobel medal was confiscated.
The military junta, which came to power in Myanmar in a 2021 coup, arrested and tried the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, 77. As of December 2022, she has been sentenced on multiple charges to 33 years in prison.
This defines the concept of the multipolar world that has been advocated by Belarus together with its allies Russia and China: a world where people go to prison for criticizing their government.
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Eugene M. Chudnovsky is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and Co-Chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists.