Belarus Nobel laureate involved in organising Chernobyl anniversary march


Svetlana Alexievich, the first Belarusian Nobel Prize winner, will be the honorary chairperson of the organising commitee of the Chernobyl Path (Charnobylski Shlyakh) in 2016, opposition leader Anatol Lyabedzka said on Facebook.

The event is to mark 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

The organizing committee applied for permission to hold the action on April, 26. The activists asked the Minsk city authorities to allow demonstrators to gather near  the National Academy of Sciences at 18.00 march along Surhanava and Arlouskaya streets, hold a final rally and lay flowers to the memorial sign ‘To Victims Of Chernobyl’

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Svetlana Alexievich is a Soviet and Belarusian investigative journalist and prose writer. Her most notable works are War’s Unwomanly Face (monologues of women in the war speaking about the aspects of the Second World War which were hardly mentiond before), Zinky Boys (first-hand accounts from the war in Afghanistan), Chernobyl Prayer.

After persecution by Lukashenka regime, she left Belarus in 2000. The International Cities of Refuge Network offered her sanctuary and during the following decade she lived in Paris, Berlin and Gothenburg. In 2011 Alexievich moved back to Minsk.

In 2013, after receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Union the writer said that the Belarusian government ‘took no notice of her’.

Read also: State-run TV turns blind eye to Alexievich while Belsat shows all – Belarus Nobel laureate’s countrymen belsat.eu

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