Olga Karach to Speak at the University of Helsinki on the 120th Anniversary of Satyagraha
Olga Karach to Speak at the University of Helsinki on the 120th Anniversary of Satyagraha
Olga Karach at the University of Helsinki: Gandhi, Satyagraha and the Power of Nonviolence 120 Years Later
Today, 11 September 2026, human rights defender and head of the organisation “Our House” Olga Karach will take part in an international seminar at the University of Helsinki marking the 120th anniversary of satyagraha — the philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance developed by Mahatma Gandhi. The seminar is being held in the context of the University of Helsinki’s von Wright and Wittgenstein seminar and brings together philosophers, intellectuals, academics and representatives of the international peace movement.
Olga Karach will speak alongside University of Helsinki Professor Thomas Wallgren, Indian public intellectual and founder of Ahimsa Conversations Rajni Bakshi, World Beyond War Africa coordinator Guy Feugap, lecturer at the Finnish Non-military Service Centre Timo Virtala, and Swedish peace and environmental movement representative Tord Björk, who is a member of the council of the International Peace Bureau — a Nobel Peace Prize laureate organisation.
Participation in such an academic and international forum at the University of Helsinki is significant in a broader sense as well: the experience of Belarusian human rights defenders becomes here not only a story of repression or exile, but an equal part of a wider European and global discussion about peace, nonviolence and the human capacity to resist injustice.
The September 11 We Remember Less Often
September 11 is associated in world history above all with violence.
On this day we remember the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. For Latin America, September 11 is also the anniversary of the 1973 military coup in Chile, the overthrow of democratically elected President Salvador Allende, and the repression that followed.
But there is also a third September 11.
On 11 September 1906, around three thousand members of the Indian community gathered at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg. They were seeking a way to resist discriminatory measures imposed by the British colonial administration. One of the organisers of the meeting was a young lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It is this gathering that is associated with the moment when the idea and practice of satyagraha began to take clear shape.
The word satyagraha comes from the Sanskrit satya — “truth” — and agraha — “firmness”, “insistence”. Gandhi defined it as a force born of truth, love and nonviolence.
Exactly 120 years have passed, yet the question itself has not disappeared: is it possible to resist injustice without becoming part of the same logic of violence that one is fighting against?
Does Strength Necessarily Mean Weapons?
In contemporary politics, strength is almost automatically associated with the capacity to compel others to submit. A strong state is one with a strong army. A strong alliance is one with substantial military resources. A strong response is one capable of inflicting sufficient damage on an opponent.
Satyagraha offers a completely different understanding of strength.
At its centre is not the question of how to force another person to submit, but how to resist injustice without destroying one’s own moral foundations in the process.
For this reason, nonviolence in Gandhi’s tradition is not passivity, capitulation or a call to do nothing. It is an idea of active resistance based on the conviction that a person can struggle against injustice without becoming a mirror image of their opponent.
It is precisely this still uncomfortable and complex meaning of nonviolence that will be discussed in Helsinki today.
In her contribution, Olga Karach will also draw on the practical experience of “Our House” in the fields of human rights and peace work. One of the central questions is what refusing to kill really means, and whether a person’s decision not to take up a weapon can be understood not as weakness, but as a conscious moral and political act.
120 Years Later
The people who gathered in a Johannesburg theatre in 1906 could not have known that the experiment they were beginning would become one of the most influential traditions of nonviolent resistance in the twentieth century.
Satyagraha later became an integral part of Gandhi’s struggle for Indian independence and inspired numerous movements of civil resistance around the world.
One hundred and twenty years later, the University of Helsinki seminar returns to the same fundamental question: what is political strength in reality — the ability to force another person to submit, or the ability to resist injustice without losing one’s humanity?
Perhaps this is why it is worth remembering not only those September 11 dates on which people destroyed, killed and seized power.
Human history also contains another September 11 — a day when people tried to discover another way of being strong.
Today, 120 years later, Belarusian human rights defender Olga Karach will also speak about this force at the University of Helsinki.
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