Monday, January 23, 2012

Should Rebiya Kadeer Be Awarded The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize?

Though many had been clamoring for a number of years now that she truly deserve to be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but is it high-time for Rebiya Kadeer to be awarded one for her Uyghur human rights campaign?

By: Ringo Bones

Even though three women shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize – i.e. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen – is it high-time yet again for another woman to be deserving of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless campaign for rights to a people that most people don’t even know about? Although if she wins this year, it could anger yet again the Beijing government like it did when Liu Xiaobo became the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Uyghur rights campaigner Rebiya Kadeer, who used to be an MP in the Beijing “monolithic” communist party has been campaigning for Uyghur cultural self-determination years before the mainstream press got attention back in 2007. Even though some Uyghur majority province in the outlying People’s Republic of China’s “Wild West” had been granted a semblance of autonomy by Beijing, Uyghurs are still denied cultural self-determination because public / state schools in these provinces are still forbidden by Beijing to teach the Uyghur language and alphabet to kids. And poorer Uyghurs who are not paying exorbitant taxes to Beijing are often subjected to persecution. Largely Muslim and quite distinct in appearance and culture in comparison to the Han Chinese majority that ran Beijing’s rather “monolithic” communist party, is it now high time for Uyghurs to get cultural self-determination that they deserve and Rebiya Kadeer be awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize?

1 comment:

  1. Remember what Rebiya Kadeer meant on the 10 Conditions of Love? And why is it that an overwhelming number of learn how to speak Uyghur language books are either written in Russian or Ukrainian Cyrillic?

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