Nobel Peace Prize contenders, from Afghanistan to ex-Soviet states and Cuba

Nobel Peace Prize contenders, from Afghanistan to ex-Soviet states and Cuba
AFP
Paris, October 10, 2012
First Published: 08:23 IST(10/10/2012)
Last Updated: 08:26 IST(10/10/2012)

The winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday
in Oslo. Here are portraits of top contenders for perhaps the world's
most-watched award.

Ales Belyatsky is the leading defender of human rights in authoritarian
Belarus, keeping up his life mission from jail in a relentless battle of
wills with the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko.

Detained since August 2011, the director of the Vyasna (Spring) rights
group was sentenced to four and a half years in a prison camp on tax
evasion charges in November, with the court also ruling to confiscate
his property.

Founded in 1996, Vyasna grew to have representatives and offices across
Belarus, helping victims of political repression during Lukashenko's
18-year rule and campaigning against the regime's use of the death penalty.

The 50-year-old is frequently placed in the punishment isolation cell
while other inmates are told not to approach him. But his resilience
remains intact.

"Everything is well," Belyatsky said in a letter from prison. "Right now
I am exactly where a human rights defender should be during such a
situation in the country."

Svetlana Gannushkina, Russia
Veteran Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, 70, is the
founder and director of Civic Assistance, which helps refugees forced
from their homes by the conflicts that erupted after the collapse of the
Soviet Union.

The group formed in 1990 has also worked to help labour migrants from
ex-Soviet states who have moved en masse to big Russian cities in the
recent years but often face horrific working conditions and rising
xenophobia.

Through the Russian rights group Memorial, she set up the Migration and
Rights network which provides legal assistance to migrants and refugees
in 50 locations across the country.

Gannushkina taught mathematics at a Moscow institute for 30 years until
2000 before devoting all her energies to rights work. She began with
helping the victims of the conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan in
the late 1980s. She was a member of the Kremlin rights council under
former president Dmitry Medvedev but resigned from the body shortly
after Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency for a third term.

Memorial, Russia
Human rights group Memorial, founded in 1989 in the final years of
Soviet rule, has emerged as the most prominent fighter against rights
violations in the sometimes violent world of Russia under President
Vladimir Putin.

The group has led the way in exposing violations in Russia's restive
Northern Caucasus, particularly in Chechnya which fought two bloody
separatist wars with Moscow after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Memorial has also been one of the few organisations ready to question
the authorities' official interpretation of modern Russian history,
which often glosses over the horrors committed under wartime tyrant
Joseph Stalin. Its crusading stance has come at a cost and its senior
Caucasus researcher Natalya Estemirova was murdered in July 2009 after
being abducted in Chechnya, a crime that has yet to be solved.

The group now faces new challenges for survival. Russia's parliament has
passed a law requiring NGOs with foreign funding to carry the tag
"foreign agent" while the government has terminated the operations of
its backer USAID.

Sima Samar, Afghanistan
Sima Samar is a pioneering Afghan doctor and human rights activist who
has endured death threats, war and the Taliban to battle tirelessly for
women in Afghanistan.

Samar, 55, is best known for setting up the Shuhada Organisation in
1989, which runs four hospitals, 12 clinics, 60 schools and two
shelters. It also creates jobs for tens of thousands of Afghan women and
girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the 1996-2001 Taliban rule,
Shuhada ran underground home classes for girls in Kabul. Its girls'
primary schools were among the few at the time and its high schools the
only ones for girls.

A former UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Sudan,
she now chairs the Independent Afghanistan Human Rights Commission, the
first body in her nation to monitor and investigate rights abuses.

Samar is a member of the Hazara ethnic minority, and in 1982 she became
the first Hazara woman to graduate from medical school.

Last month, Samar won the Swedish Right Livelihood Award -- known as the
"alternative Nobel" -- honouring those who work to improve the lives of
others.

Yoani Sanchez, Cuba
Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, 37, for more than five years has dared to
take direct aim in print at the Americas' only one-party Communist regime.

Her blog is not outlawed or illegal in Cuba, but since most Cubans (with
average income under $20 a month) do not have Internet access, she is
largely unknown at home while garnering awards and fame abroad.

With a wry, restrained style, the former language student has surged to
the forefront of a new generation of cyber-challenges to Cuba's
five-decade-old geriatric regime.

She calls her blog Generation Y -- after the Soviet-era generation
around her age, many of whose parents gave their children
exotic-sounding, Russian-inspired names starting with Y.

Her dispatches -- usually several articles a week -- and Tweets are a
critical take on tough everyday issues that face Cubans -- the extreme
economic hardship, the regime's inertia, and the desperation that often
leads Cubans to risk their lives and leave the country illegally.

One of the interviews she gave to foreign media earned her an anonymous
attack from Fidel Castro. He mentioned a "young Cuban woman" at the
service of "the neocolonial press." She shot back with a blog post
saying: "Some old instruments of the Soviet era just refuse to die."

Gene Sharp, United States
Gene Sharp literally wrote the book on non-violent revolution, credited
most recently with serving as a how-to manual for the Arab Spring uprisings.

The 93-page "Dictatorship to Democracy: A Framework for Liberation" has
been published in more than 30 languages since it was written in 1993 by
the now 84-year-old political scientist at the behest of Myanmar
activists. "Primarily, I try to understand the nature and potential of
non-violent forms of struggle to undermine dictatorships," explained
Sharp in "How to Start a Revolution," a 2011 documentary about his life
and work.

Born and raised in Ohio, Sharp -- the son of a Protestant clergyman --
studied political science and sociology in his home state and at Oxford
University in Britain where, in 1968, he completed a doctoral thesis on
the politics of nonviolent action.

Dubbed by some "the quiet American" for his soft-spoken manner, he has
taught at the University of Massachusetts and Harvard. He also founded
the Albert Einstein Institution, named after the Nobel prize-winning
physicist and pacifist, in East Boston as a centre of research into
nonviolent forms of political struggle.

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