Nobel Peace Prize 2010

Is Nobel Peace Prize 2010 really controversial?

Md. Masum Billah

Jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has been named the winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Making the announcement in Oslo, the head of the Norwegian Nobel committee said Mr. Lu was 'the foremost symbol of the human rights struggle in China."Several countries including the US, France and Germany called for his immediate release. Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland admitted he knew the choice would be controversial. He told local television before the announcement you would understand when you hear the name. Mr. Liu, 54 perhaps China's best known dissident is serving a 11-year term on subversion charges, in a cell 500 miles from Beijing and remains unknown to most Chinese.Liu Xiaobo is one of three people to have received the prize while incarcerated by their own government, after the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 and the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935. By awarding the prize to Mr Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has provided an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing's authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and a spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China's economic rise.

The Nobel peace prize committee's announcement on October 8th vehemently infuriated Chinese leaders. It may well give extra ammunition to hardliners in China who argue that the West is bent on undermining Communist Party rule. The award of the peace to Liu Xiaobo , therefore, is a nice way to undermine China, the greatest threat to the U.S. in Asia. Any dissident who helps portray countries antagonizing the US as brutal is eligible and many have gotten Nobel Peace prizes. Did any Latin American dissent of the US Dictators ever receive a Nobel Prize? No, they were all exterminated by CIA trained and funded Death Squads.

Did Mao Tse-Tung, Mohandas Ghandi and other men who liberated their people and who are considered by historian 'Men of Universal Destiny' receive a Nobel? Of course, not. Did Henry Kissinger receive a Nobel for the US war and defeat in Vietnam? Sure he did.

China reacted with outrage in 1989 when the Nobel peace prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader in exile, to all appearances as a rebuke to the government for having crushed the Tiananmen Square protests earlier that year. Though China regards Tibet as an integral part of the nation, Mr. Liu stands apart as an ethnic Han Chinese who has devoted himself to addressing the politics of China .Mr. is precisely the kind of dissident that they partly regards as most threatening. He is a seasoned campaigner, a veteran of the Tiananmen protests who has shown no sign of succumbing to the party's intimation in spite of three period of incarceration over the past two decades. He is a mildly spoken literary critic. Who has created the sort of consensus that is unusual to forge among China's infighting intellectuals? Mr. Liu's Charter 08, a document that calls for democracy was signed initially by more than 300 liberal thinkers. It struck a reasoned tone to which radicals and moderate alike could subscribe.

The debate over universal values that it helped to fuel still rages within the party today. Mr. Liu was arrested in December 2008 two days before the charter 08 was made public. The authorities chose Christies Day 2009 to announce his 11 year jail term for 'inciting subversion of state power.'

There is likely to be much online comment in support of Mr. Liu's award in China but the Nobel prize is unlikely to galvanize any concerted protest acting such as the party would find difficult to suppress. There will be an upsurge in demands from abroad for Mr. Liu's release. Yet major Western powers are little inclined to jeopardize their relationships with China for the sake of individual dissidents. Just two months after Mr. Lu's arrest, Hillary Clinton, America's secretary of state said after a visit to Beijing that she had raised human rights but 'our prestige on these issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis.'China is a past master of defecting Western concern about its treatment of dissidents. In the late 1980s, Deng Xiaoping spoke dismissively to his colleagues about the West's response to the sentencing in 1979 of a dissident, Wei Jingsheng to 15 years in prison. "We put Wei Jingsheng behind bars, didn't we, he boasted, did that damage China's reputation? We haven't released him but China's image has not been tarnished by that. Our reputation improves day by day.

In a move that in retrospect appears to have been counterproductive, a senior Chinese official had warned the Norwegian committees' secretary that giving the prize to Mr. Liu would adversely affect relations between the two countries. The committee in announcing the prize Friday noted that China the world's second biggest economy should be commended for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But it chastised the government for ignoring basic rights guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution and in the international conventions to which Beijing is a party. In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China's citizen. Committee members said adding China's new status must entail increased responsibility.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to the news, calling it a desecration of the peace prize and said it would harm Norwegian -Chinese relations. The Chinese government summoned Norway's ambassador to protest the award, a spokesman for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry told. The Nobel Committee giving the peace prize to such a person runs completely contrary to the aims of the prize, Ma Xhaoxu, a spokesman said. Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.Headlines about the reward were nowhere to be found in the Chinese-language state media or on the country's main internet portals. Broadcasts about Liu Xiaobo on CNN which reach only luxury compound and hotels in China were blackened out throughout evening. The prize is an enormous psychological boost for China' beleaguered reform movement and an affirmation of the two decades Mr. Liu has spent advocating peaceful political change in the face of unremitting hostility from enshrining Chinese Communist Party.

Blacklisted from the academic and barred from publishing in China, Mr. Liu has been harassed and detained repeatedly since 1989 when he stepped into the dram playing out on Tiananmen Square by staging a hunger strike and then negotiating the peaceful retreat of student demonstrators as thousands of soldiers stood by with rifles drawn.' "Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4 if not for the work of Liua dn the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square", said Gao Yu, a veteran journalist and fellow dissident who was arrested in the hours before the tanks began moving through the city.

Common people put forward comments on the announcement. Here goes one comment against the decision. "Every country has its own faith and culture. You Western countries shouldn't look at us through your own eyes. We have our own faith and culture to follow. Since Liu Xiaobo is Chinese, he must follow Chinese rules. So he is not the human rights fighter and he doesn't' deserve the prize. " says Penghong, Chngdu, Sichuan. On the contrary, Hoien L Cadogan, Hong Kong China says "What else can be more encouraging and touching to happen to the democracy in China? This is a beginning of worldwide recognition of the striving democratic movement in China. The award will certainly bring more attention from the world on the democratic situation in China." Actually, it does not necessarily suggest a safer candidate that demands worldwide consensus, but a candidate that more likely represents what the Nobel Peace Prize represents.



(Md. Masum Billah can be reached at mmbillah2000 @yahoo.com)