This year’s Nobel Peace Prize sends a signal against the tyrants Putin and Lukashenko. The courage and tenacity with which Russian and Belarusian dissidents challenge their oppressors is often underestimated in the West.
The presidents of Russia and Belarus, Putin and Lukashenko, personally dislike each other. But they work hand in hand in the repression of civil rights activists (archive shot from 2021).
2022 is the year Europe was snatched from its dreams and confronted with the worst bloodbath since World War II. Great power politics carried out with tank armies – this specter seemed to have been banished after the fall of Hitler and at the latest after the fall of Soviet communism. But with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s back to reality on that continent. Against this background, it is logical that the Norwegian Nobel Committee wanted to send a signal against Putin’s war with this year’s peace prize.
What helps peace the most?
Who has achieved the most on the way to peace is open to debate. Is it American President Biden who is keeping isolationist forces in check in his country and has helped Ukraine fight back against Russian oppression more than any other leader? Or, even more provocatively, would one have to honor the manufacturer of the Himars rocket launchers, since no other single weapon system has been able to stop the invaders and free more and more Ukrainians from the Russian reign of terror? Certainly this idea would not have pleased Alfred Nobel, who donated the prize. As the inventor of military explosives, Nobel was a pioneer of modern armaments technology, but in his will he advocated the “abolition or reduction of standing armies.”
Nevertheless, this is also one of the findings of the “annus horribilis” 2022: weapons are essential to secure peace. Years of diplomacy with Putin have ended in shambles, and threats of sanctions have also fizzled out. On the other hand, the catastrophe could probably have been avoided if Ukraine had had early access to a sufficient number of weapons for self-defense. Most Western European governments instinctively resisted such a view before the war, and the European left in particular still struggles with it.
Nevertheless, the Nobel Committee made an excellent choice this year. By honoring the banned Russian civil rights organization Memorial, jailed human rights activist Ales Belyatsky and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, it pays tribute to brave fighters for justice.
For once, it’s fitting to lump Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians in the same pot. In contrast to the Kremlin’s imperialist ideology of the “unity” of these peoples, the joint honor underlines that there is a civil society with a common goal in all three states. It consists of investigating crimes committed by dictatorial regimes, denouncing them and thus perhaps preventing them in the future. Belyatsky’s organization and Memorial are doing this in the vise of state repression, while the Kiev Center for Civil Liberties is free to work and is currently concentrating on investigating Russian war crimes in the country.
Even in Russia, the longing for freedom is not dead
The award ceremony is a recognition of the important work that such groups do away from the media spotlight. Authoritarian regimes too often manage to muzzle the few tireless fighters for freedom and justice, or denigrate them in state propaganda as obsessive activists and foreign-controlled troublemakers. This year’s Nobel Prize sends the opposite signal. On the one hand, he reminds us that even dictators like Putin or Belarusian Lukashenko cannot completely extinguish the light of freedom.
On the other hand, the award provides a little help to those forces who, despite the superiority of the state’s repressive apparatus, are convinced of the outstanding value of universal civil rights. These people are a weak minority in Russia and Belarus. But their energy and moral authority will be essential when the aging tyrants of Moscow and Minsk step down and a chance for a more free and peaceful future presents itself.