Belarusian Foreign Ministry spokesman Anatoly Glaz told Sputnik on Friday that the recent decisions of the Nobel Committee regarding awards of the peace prize have been politicized to the extent that Minsk lost all interest in the award
MINSK (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th October, 2022) Belarusian Foreign Ministry spokesman Anatoly Glaz told Sputnik on Friday that the recent decisions of the Nobel Committee regarding awards of the peace prize have been politicized to the extent that Minsk lost all interest in the award.
Earlier in the day, the Committee announced laureates of the Nobel Peace Prize 2022. Those were Ales Bialiatski, the chairman of the Minsk-based organization Viasna Human Rights Centre, unregistered in Belarus; the Russian human rights organization Memorial (recognized in Russia as a foreign agent); and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties.
"You know, in recent years, a number of fundamental decisions and we are talking about the peace prize of the Nobel Committee are so politicized that, sorry, but Alfred Nobel must be tired of rolling over in his grave. But this is their inner workings and their conscience, we do not want to get into it and comment on something. We just lost all interest in it at a certain stage," Glaz said.
According to Alexander Bashkin, a member of the Russian upper chamber's constitutional legislation committee, the West continues the policy of double standards, and the Nobel Peace Prize award is also politicized.
"Not only the International Olympic Committee engages in politics and pursue trends from the European Union, NATO, the Pentagon. In addition to sports, in addition to science, the Nobel Committee is now also trying to keep up with its comrades," Bashkin told Sputnik.
A number of employees of the Viasna center are in custody in Belarus. The organization's leaders, including Bialiatski, were detained in July 2021 in connection to a criminal case under the articles "organization and financing of group actions that grossly violate public order" and "tax evasion." The Belarusian Investigative Committee said that a number of representatives of non-state organizations and the country's media secretly received financing from abroad, and were involved in tax evasion and financing of protest activity.
In 2011, Bialiatski was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for tax evasion on an especially large scale.
During the protests after the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, Bialiatski joined the coordination council of the country's opposition, created on the initiative of former presidential candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who moved to Lithuania. In Belarus, criminal cases were initiated against a number of members of the council, including on charges of calls for the seizure of power, the creation of an extremist entity and a conspiracy to seize state power by unconstitutional means.
