Nobel peace prize for Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai

From the Wall Street Journal
Indian children’s-rights activist Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani teenager shot by Taliban militants after campaigning for girls’ education, were awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, in the same week that cross-border violence flared up between their countries.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee sought to draw attention to problems that persist globally: child labor and the limits imposed on women and girls by radical Islamists.

In its statement announcing the prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said it is "an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism."

http://online.wsj.com/articles/nobel-peace-prize-awarded-to-kailash-satyarthi-malala-yousafzai-1412933020

Posted by Bhaskar Menon at Undiplomatic Times

"The award of the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi is excellent not just because of the merit of the recipients but in its timing, when the India-Pakistan border has been for weeks a ribbon of meaningless armed conflict and unnecessary death. "

"The award underlines the hope and promise of youth in an area where older generations on both sides of the border have failed miserably to understand the hatreds and violence of their common past, much less escape it."

"If the two laureates work together, as Satyarthi has proposed in comments to reporters, it could mark an important new beginning for peace in the region."

"In contemplating that scenario it is important to underline that anything they do together should be seen as more than an emotional phenomenon. "

"It is an opportunity to focus attention in both countries not only on their common humanity but on the tragic history of colonial manipulation that split their shared culture and traditions. "

"In addition, the award points to two aspects of the misery of children in South Asia that highlight how India and Pakistan are victims of the same contemporary circumstances. "

"One is that the child labor that Satyarthi has spent his life trying to eradicate is rooted in the same bitter poverty that drove the Taliban to try and kill Malala; her bright insouciance threatened the only livelihood they have, the trade of opium and heroin. "

"The second is the genesis of that common economic reality in colonial rule. "

"Britain did not just drive what was once the most prosperous region of the world into poverty; post-colonial manipulations to protect the interests of its ruling elite in the lucrative drug trade and related money laundering have been a major factor in the murderous terrorism that has blocked or slowed all development."

"Perhaps the most poisonous of those manipulations has been the harnessing of religion to the ugliest of human drives, fear, anger and hatred; it has had a continuing afterlife in India-Pakistan relations. "

"In celebrating Malala the teenage cherub espousing education for girls and Satyarthi the angel of enslaved children, we have the opportunity to address a whole range of dark issues emanating from post-colonial Britain."

http://undiplomatictimes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/an-excellent-nobel-award.html