Human rights advocate, Ales Bialiatski, could not be notified of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in real time – not by the awards committee in Norway and even not by his family. For the past 15 months, Bialiatski has been imprisoned in a detention facility in Minsk, and Belarussian President AleksandrvLukashenko's regime has denied him any contact with the outer world.
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"Until his trial begins, we can only send letters by mail – and even these go through a censorship process," Bialiatski's wife, Natalia Pinchuk, told Israel Hayom after the Norwegian Nobel Committee named him among the three recipients of the prize. "He also censors himself. The letters' importance is in their actual sending: I see that it is his handwriting and I know that he is alive. We could not tell him [about his award]."
In the conversation with Israel Hayom, Pinchuk says that she was totally surprised by the announcement. "I am still trying to digest this. Ales' candidacy has been submitted several times already and it involved work, conversations, and meetings. This was very surprising news and it is difficult even to gather one's thoughts." According to Pinchuk, several hours after the announcement, Bialiatski had already received the message, "probably by watching television." She asked not to talk politics; the fear of the government's revenge is too great.
Bialiatski, 60, is one of the most prominent and veteran figures in the battle for civil autonomy in Belarus. He embarked on his activities for Belarussian revival already during the days of the USSR: He was one of the founders of the Belarusian Popular Front, fighting for Belarus exiting the Soviet Union and was one of the founders of the Union of Belarusian Writers. His next stop was the management of the literary museum in Minsk, but in 1996 he delved into the political unrest in the country: The new president, Lukashenko, began to turn the state into a dictatorship and Bialiatski took leadership of Viasna ("Spring"), an organization caring for the many detainees from demonstrations around the country.
Bialiatski was arrested in 2011, first for "tax evasions" and during his three years in a penal colony, he authored two books. After his release, he returned to his legal civil activities. In an interview he gave then, he said that he does not plan to leave Belarus. "I am comfortable here, even at the penal colony. The atmosphere in the Belarussian society is important to me."
"No moral right to leave"
After the start of the protests against Lukashenko's forging of election results in August 2020, Bialiatski joined the United Democratic Forces of Belarus' Coordination Council, which later dismantled and most of its members were arrested or deported. Bialiatski was arrested in July 2021.
Q: You tried to convince him to leave anyway?
"Yes, I spoke to him. It was clear during the protests that he would be arrested. It was obvious. But he refused because his peers had already been arrested and he said, 'I have no moral right to leave while my peers are sitting in jail. This would mean that I have deserted them. So I have to stay. This is always what he believed in.'
Q: How do you think the prize will affect his fate? Do you think it will give him an early release? Or actually, worsen his situation?
"I am even too scared to think about it; one way or the other. I am scared that something will go wrong. Scared that something that might be good, will go wrong. So under these circumstances, we are very, very careful. We are just too scared to talk."
Q: What would you like to wish him?
"I am really too scared to say. Let's see how things develop. I send wishes to the other winners and wish them a lot of mental strength."
Bialiatski, who won the Lech Wałęsa, Vaclav Havel, and US State Department Prizes, is the second Belarussian to win the Nobel Peace Prize in seven years. Preceded him authoress Svetlana Alexievich, who was also forced to leave Belarus after she dared protest against the regime.
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