Binalakshmi & Svetlana Win Anna Politkovskaya Award
Reach All Women in WAR (RAW in WAR) Anna Politkovskaya award 2018, one of the prestigious international award given to women human rights defenders from war and conflict zones, has been conferred jointly to Binalakshmi Nepram, an activist from Manipur in northeast India and Nobel literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich, a renowned writer and investigative journalist from Belarus. Remarkably, both women awardees have suffered death threats or persecution and are in exile from their home countries. RAW in WAR, a UK-based charity organization that provides this award, applauding the bravery of both women in speaking out and defying injustice, violence and extremism in the context of ‘forgotten’ armed conflicts, announced the courageous global award on micro-blogging site Twitter on Thursday October 4, 2018.
The awards will be presented to the winners in March 2019 in London at RAW in WAR’s ‘Refusing to be Silenced’ event, which is part of the 2019 Women of the World Festival at the London’s Southbank Centre.
RAW in War annually gives out the award to mark the anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya’s, a Russian journalist, writer and human rights activist, who was assassinated in the elevator of her Moscow apartment block at the age of 48 on October 7, 2006. Politkovskaya extensively reported on Russia’s volatile political developments, particularly, the second Chechen war (1999-2005). Her fearless work put her in the Russian military’s line of fire. She was arrested by the military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. Anna Politkovskaya Award is given to celebrate women human rights defenders from conflict zones, who like Politkovskaya face life-threatening situations.
Binalakshmi Nepram, born in Imphal, a humanitarian female activist, on the Indo-Myanmar border, for the advocacy of gender rights and women-led disarmament movements with the objective of arresting gun culture and bringing about peace for her home state of Manipur in particular and northeast India in general, had once worked for Oxfam, co-founded Control Arms Foundation of India (CAFI) in 2004 – India’s first civil society organisation to work on disarmament and to oppose growing militarisation. She is the author of ‘India and the Arms Trade Treaty’. She is also the founder of Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, which has since its inception in 2007 helped more than 20,000 women survivors of gun violence in Manipur to rebuild their lives and obtain justice.
Svetlana Alexievich, 70, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 for her portrayal of the lives of Soviet women during World War II, as well as the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Soviet military adventure in Afghanistan, and for speaking out about injustices in the post-Soviet space and giving voice to those trapped in conflict. She repeatedly criticized the Russian annexation of Crimea and human rights violations in Ukraine. Under threats from President Lukashenko for the publication of her books, she stayed in exile and returned to Belarus, a landlocked nation in Eastern Europe.