EDITORIAL : KYIV POST, UKRAINE

 

 

A true champion

Yelena Bonner died on June 18 at the age of 88. The human rights activist and wife of nuclear physicist-turned-dissident Andrei Sakharov, who preceded her in death in 1989, was a true champion.
She tirelessly fought for human rights both in the Soviet Union and, after its collapse, in Russia.
Her powerful voice will be sorely missed in a part of the world that is still fighting to break free from the shackles of authoritarianism.
Bonner was a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976.
She shot to public attention when, after Sakharov was exiled to the town of Gorky, she became his lifeline to the outside world, ferrying out his writings.
Foreign reporters recall how she provided a way for dissidents to communicate with the outside world, passing messages to correspondents and diplomats, despite constant attention from the KGB.
She, too, was arrested and exiled in 1984. She traveled to the U.S. in 1985 for heart surgery, but was only given permission to travel after hunger strikes by her husband.

When then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986, he handed over a list of political prisoners he wanted released.
When Sakharov was allowed to return to Moscow, he refused unless a further 23 political prisoners were also released, including Mustafa Dzhemilev, the leading Crimean Tatar dissident.
The couple finally made it back to Moscow in December 1986 as Gorbachev launched perestroika and glasnost.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, two years after Sakharov’s death, did not end Bonner’s activism.
She railed against the bloody Russian assault in Chechnya in 1994, and criticized the rise of KGB clans under Vladimir Putin, the prime minister and former president, himself a former spy.
The need for heroes such as Bonner is as acute as ever.
Russia is an authoritarian, one-party state. Ukraine is heading down the same path. Belarus is Europe’s last dictatorship.
Bonner’s achievements were impressive.
The countries of the former Soviet Union are crying out for others with her courage, conviction and devotion to freedom and human rights.