PARIS, Oct 7, 2022 (BSS/AFP) - The Russian rights group Memorial is
honoured to have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but it should have
gone to political prisoners such as Alexei Navalny, who risk their lives for
contesting President Vladimir Putin, the group's co-founder said Friday.
Lev Ponomarev, who helped create Memorial in the late 1980s under the
perestroika Soviet reform drive, said his group had been "destroyed" as Russia
presses its invasion of Ukraine, but was still seeking to continue its work.
"We were just 10 people and we thought everything would start with
perestroika. It did not work out that way," Ponomarev told Agence France-Presse
in an interview in Paris, where he now has political asylum.
"It is very well deserved and of course when I think of what I thought 30
years ago I am happy," he said.
But Ponomarev said an even better move by the Norwegian peace prize
committee would have been to give the award to Navalny, Putin's leading
opposition critic and an outspoken anti-corruption figure, or to liberal
opposition figures Vladimir Kara-Murza or Ilya Yashin, who are also imprisoned.
"Those who are behind bars are the ones who need to be rewarded every
year," Ponomarev said on the sidelines of a forum organised by the exiles group
Russie-Libertes (Russia-Freedom) and the Paris City Hall.
"I am compelled now to say that the correct choice would have been to give
the Nobel prize -- if they want to support Russia when it is under its harshest
regime -- to political figures," he said.
"I mean Navalny, I mean Vladimir Kara-Murza, I mean Ilya Yashin. People who
consciously choose that position, knowing they are risking their lives and
don't step aside, and solidly say the words that need to be said."
Kara-Murza, who was jailed in April for denouncing the Kremlin's Ukraine
offensive, has been charged with high treason, his lawyer said Thursday.
Yashin was jailed in July, also after denouncing Moscow's invasion of
Ukraine.
- Organisation 'destroyed' -
Along with Memorial, the Nobel peace prize went to Ukraine's Center for
Civil Liberties, which is documenting alleged Russian war crimes against the
Ukrainian people, and the detained activist Ales Bialiatski of Belarus.
The Russian authorities ordered the closure of Memorial last year in a move
Putin has done nothing to halt, and the pressures against rights advocates has
further worsened during the invasion of Ukraine.
Ponomarev, a former physicist, has been at the centre of the Russian rights
scene since the fall of the Soviet Union.
In Paris, he continues to push for the release of political prisoners in
Russia and remains in close touch with his Memorial colleagues who remain in
Russia.
He expressed doubt that at this point the prize would prompt Putin to
change his attitude to Memorial, though there was a possibility he could bring
up the organisation's status in eventual negotiations with the West.
"Putin is a total and utter global evil and it will not make him relate to
Memorial better at all. But if he trades with the West then possibly it could
be the issue of some kind of trading," Ponomarev said.
"The organisation is destroyed but there are people who want to preserve
the archives and work. Most of Memorial's staff have gone abroad," he said.
Ponomarev, 81, obtained political refugee status in France after fleeing
threats of arrest in Russia, but said he hoped his exile would not prove
permanent.
"I think I can go back and I am working a lot on that, every day, with this
activism. I left because there were threats against me, a criminal case, I
could have been jailed," he said.