The human rights activist, currently in prison, has never ceased, since the 2000s, to defend the Belarusses persecuted by the regime.
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The first concerned was probably the last to learn the news. Friday, October 7, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Belarusian Defender of Human Rights Ales Bialiatski at the same time as the Russian NGO Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties (CLC) Ukrainian. The man has been in prison since his arrest in July 2021 during a raid of Belarusian security services on several offices of the human rights organization Viasna (“spring”), of which he is the founder . Since then, he has been waiting for his trial in a predemption center, deprived of the visit of his relatives. He is one of the 1,348 political prisoners of the Minsk regime.
Two years ago, in August 2020, the re -election in Belarus of Alexandre Loukachenko for a sixth mandate with the fraudulent score of 80 % of the votes had triggered demonstrations of unprecedented scale in this country neighboring the Ukraine and Russia. The autocrat’s response, supported economically and politically by the Kremlin, had been brutal: massive arrests, multiple violence, including in prisons.
The political crisis and the threat of many years behind bars had pushed the majority of opponents and representatives of civil society to leave the country in order to continue to fight from the outside. Ales Bialiatski refuses to continue his fight on the spot. “He is a man of great courage,” observes Natalia Satsunkevich, joined by the phone in Vilnius, where she resides in exile like the majority of Viasna members. “He knew he could be arrested but he had decided to stay despite everything.”
creation of the Belarusian Popular Front
ales Bialiatski was born in 1962 in the Soviet Union, in the current Russian Republic of Carélie, and he spent his childhood in the Belarusian city of Svetlorogorsk, in south-east of the country. From the early 1980s, man with a dry and chiseled face engaged in pro -democratic initiatives, pleading for the creation of a sovereign and independent Belarusian State.
Among its fights, the defense of the language and the Belarusian, stifled and restrained after centuries of Russian domination. This struggle is illustrated by its role in the creation of the Belarusian Popular Front, which aims to recognize national identity. The movement will become the main opposition party to Alexandre Loukachenko after coming to power in 1994.
Two years later, the activist founded the Viasna organization while the Biélorusian president modifies the institutions and exercises an increasingly autocratic power. The 2000s mark a turning point. Ales Bialiatski will be dedicated only to the defense of the Belarusses persecuted by the regime. He will spend three years from his life in prison from 2011 to 2014 for charges of tax fraud. “Completely mounted loads, very similar to those of today,” said Kanstantsin Staradubets, another representative of Viasna, also refugee in Vilnius.
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