29 October 2015
The Confused Prize
Is someone taking the peace?
By Neil Tidmarsh
Nobel” is a Swedish name; “Confucius” is a Chinese name; but it’s an interesting coincidence that “Nobel” can easily be taken for “noble” in English, and “Confucius” can easily be taken for “confused”.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the National Dialogue Quartet, a Tunisian organisation of four groups – trade unionists, employers, lawyers and human rights activists – which worked together to successfully turn their country away from civil war and towards peace, pluralism and democracy following the Jasmine Revolution, Tunisia’s Arab Spring. They overcame their own differences to open up dialogue and negotiations between the conflicting forces which were threatening to tear the country apart.
The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to some (shall we say) less than obvious candidates in the past. President Obama received it in 2009 when he had only just been elected, and the EU received it in 2012 (and there were strange rumours that Angela Merkel was the favourite this year). But the 2015 award has been universally welcomed as fit and just. The National Dialogue Quartet is a worthy recipient, honouring a list which in recent years has included Malala Yousafzai (2014) and Liu Xiaobo (2010).
Liu Xiaobo’s prize was a particularly high-profile award. He is the Chinese literary critic, writer, professor and human rights activist who was imprisoned in 2008 for helping to write (and for signing) ‘Charter 08’, a human rights manifesto calling for political freedom and economic reform in China. He was awarded the Peace prize “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. The Chinese foreign ministry denounced the award, and an official complaint was made to the Norwegian ambassador. Liu Xiaobo remains in prison and his wife is under house arrest.
Another response to Liu Xiaobo’s award was the launching in 2010 of the Confucius Peace Prize as a Chinese rival to the Nobel Peace Prize. Its foundations are unclear – the Chinese government has reportedly denied any connection with it and the Ministry of Culture apparently attempted to ban it in 2011 – but its committee of 76 members sits in Hong Kong and awards the annual prize, worth £50,000, at more or less the same time as the Nobel committee awards theirs. Past recipients include Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro (those awards to President Obama and to the EU aren’t looking so controversial now, are they?). And this year they awarded the Confucius Peace Prize to … Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe.
No, this is not a joke. Check out the calendar. It isn’t April 1st, but Halloween – a time for horror stories about a terrifying bogeyman who presides over a regime of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and, some say, torture and murder (“…an oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger…” – Confucius).
Mugabe was a freedom-fighter against white-minority rule in Rhodesia who became prime minister in 1980 when that country became Zimbabwe. Throughout the 1980s he consolidated his grip on power, moving the country towards a one-party state. He set up a ruthless, North Korean trained security force, the Fifth Brigade, to crush opposition to his ZANU-PF party. He ejected his rival Joshua Nkomo from the cabinet in 1983, and for the next few years the Fifth Brigade set about destroying Nkomo’s ZAPU party power-base in the minority Ndebele tribe in Matabeleland. BBC Panorama reported on this ethnic cleansing, claiming that 20,000 civilians died and were buried in mass graves. By 1987 he was not only prime minister (head of government) but also president (head of state) and commander-in-chief (head of the armed forces), with the power to dissolve parliament and to declare martial law.
His government has proved violently intolerant of any kind of opposition, has ejected white farmers from their land, is stridently homophobic (homosexuality is illegal in Zimbabwe – it is even illegal for members of the same sex to kiss, hug, or hold hands – Mugabe has called gay people “worse than pigs, goats and birds”) and has driven the country’s economy into the ground, with its people regularly facing starvation.
In 2008, his unpopularity was such that even his powerful state machinery wasn’t enough to prevent a first round defeat to Morgan Tsangirai in the presidential elections. Morgan Tsangirai had already been arrested and beaten up following a prayer meeting in a Harare suburb, and another opposition leader was killed and protesters were violently suppressed by ZANU-PF thugs. Tsangirai pulled out of the elections, and Mugabe was re-elected unopposed.
This episode prompted Queen Elizabeth II, on the advice of the British parliament, to strip him of his honorary knighthood; the foreign office commented “This action has been taken as a mark of revulsion at the abuse of human rights and abject disregard for the democratic process in Zimbabwe over which President Mugabe has presided.” The University of Edinburgh stripped Mugabe of his honorary degree in 2007. The University of Massachusetts Amherst revoked his honorary law degree in 2008. The Michigan State University revoked his honorary law degree also in 2008.
The South African archbishop Desmond Tutu said that Mugabe had “mutated into something quite unbelievable. He has turned into a kind of Frankenstein for his people.” The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, has called Mugabe “the worst kind of racist dictator.”
The chairman of the Confucius Peace Prize Committee, Qiao Damu, defended the award by pointing out that people in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are worse off than people in Zimbabwe. Another committee member, Liu Zhiquin, said “Mugabe has been in power for such a long time that he could be easily labelled a dictator, tyrant or despot.” China has had close political and commercial relations with Mugabe since January 1979, even before he became prime minister – he turned to Beijing for support as the Soviet Union were backing his rival Joshua Nkomo – so China should indeed know how long he has been in power.
Confused? I certainly am.
