Assenaar Ralph du Long is ‘incredibly happy with it’, he must admit honestly. He personally managed to get the Ukrainian Nobel Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk to speak during the May 4 commemoration in Assen. “You don’t get a Nobel Prize winner over every day,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.
The reason is ‘deeply sad’ with the ongoing war in Ukraine. And she does not literally come across the floor at the memorial service in the Roman Catholic Church. But she can be heard via a live video connection, to talk about the war in Ukraine and what it does to the people there. The theme of the memorial service fits in seamlessly: ‘Living with war’.
Matviichuk won the Nobel Peace Prize last year with her human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties. Du Long knows her personally. De Assenaar, until recently a PvdA Member of Parliament, has been an international human rights trainer for years. Their activities overlap, especially on the human rights front, with Du Long mainly operating on the edges of Eastern Europe and Russia. For example, he has worked for about ten years for the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum, the largest platform of European and Russian human rights organisations.
Du Long brought Matviichuk to Assen before for an event on human rights. That was in 2015 during International Women’s Day. She was physically present then, but she did not yet have the Nobel Peace Prize in her pocket.
For the 4 May service, the Platform for Philosophical Organizations Assen initially had Du Long himself in mind as a guest speaker. De Assenaar is actively involved in relief efforts to Ukraine for the Protestant Church of the Netherlands. For example, he has just returned from a two-week trip with an aid transport.
“And of course I can tell you something about it myself, but I immediately suggested to the organization whether it wouldn’t be much better to ask someone from a current war zone, for example Ukraine. Someone who is directly involved, such as Oleksandra. That fits in perfectly with the theme ‘Living with war’. This way you ensure that this terrible war remains in the spotlight and that you create more support for aid actions that are needed for Ukraine,” says Du Long.
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