Amnesty International Named Olga Karach Human Rights Defender of the Year: A 2005 Retrospective
Today marks a milestone: it has been twenty years since Olga Karach was named Human Rights Defender of the Year — not just by anyone, but by Amnesty International Belarus.
Yet even two decades ago Olga was already an established figure: a teacher, a civic activist, and a politician. By that time she had graduated from school with a gold medal and from university with a red diploma, become a member of BAJ, already faced trial for distributing printed materials, headed the regional branch of the opposition youth movement “Zubr,” been voted the most beautiful politician by the newspaper Svobodnye Novosti, and had been elected to the Vitebsk City Council.
By then, Our House (Nash Dom) had already existed for three years as a national organization, distributing 150–200 thousand printed materials every month.
What did not exist was Google’s ownership of YouTube — meaning that information still had to be delivered to Belarusians the Gutenberg-and-Skaryna way. That is why the organization had its own printing press (in reality, a portable Ricoh-based printing system), which produced everything that was then sent across Belarusian cities.
Unfortunately, the press was seized during a search after the 2020 post-election crackdown. But one day we will reclaim it and place it on a pedestal as a monument to the human rights work of Our House (Nash Dom).
For now, watch Nash Dom TV — labeled extremist by the Belarusian regime — and follow us on social media, more than twenty of which have also been labeled extremist in Belarus, including our Telegram channel used for distributing and exchanging humanitarian aid.
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