It would take a miracle for Ales Byalyatski to receive the Nobel Peace Prize himself.

He has been held captive by the regime of Belarusian dictator Alexandr Lukashenko since July 2021.

Just in time for his 60th birthday last week, it was announced that the charges against him had been escalated – from the allegation of tax evasion, for which he had been imprisoned from 2011 to 2014, to that of "smuggling cash".

The alleged financial crimes were not the real reason for Byalyatski's imprisonment then and now.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in Politics.

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The flimsy indictment is intended to cast a bad light on a man who is a thorn in Lukashenko's side for his human rights work and who has already received many international awards for his work, including the so-called "Alternative Nobel Prize" in 2020.

2011 arrested for "tax evasion"

After the violent suppression of mass protests by the democratic opposition in Belarus in spring 1996, Byalyatski founded the human rights organization "Vyazna" ("Spring").

This was in response to Lukashenko's determined authoritarian rule since his victory in the 1994 free presidential election.

Byalyatski's fate reflects Lukashenko's changing dealings with his opponents, depending on the political situation.

Lukashenko's regime was in a crisis when he was arrested for the first time in the summer of 2011 for "tax evasion". Despite massive repression after the protests against the rigging of the elections at the end of 2010, thousands gathered in Minsk for "silent protests".

Byalyatsky's early release from prison three years later came at a time when, in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine, Lukashenko was beginning to put out feelers west again to secure Belarusian independence (and thus his rule) against his “ally” Putin.

Active since the eighties

In the early 1980s, before the start of liberalization in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, Byalyatski was a student of literature in a conspiratorial group that dreamed of an independent, democratic Belarus.

When that became possible during perestroika, he made this commitment public.

In 1988 he was one of the initiators of the commemorative demonstrations for the Belarusians murdered under Stalin, which became the starting point of the independence movement.

In the 1990s he was active in the "Belarusian People's Front", an opposition party that wanted to distinguish the country from Russia as clearly as possible, but at the time met with little understanding from a large majority of Belarusians.