FONTE: The New York Times
By SARAH LYALL
OSLO — Imprisoned and incommunicado in China, the Chinese writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, his absence marked at the prize ceremony here by an empty chair.
For the first time since the 1935 prize, when the laureate, Carl von Ossietzky, languished in a concentration camp and Hitler forbade any sympathizers to attend the ceremony, no relative or representative of the winner was present to accept the award or the $1.5 million check it comes with. Nor was Mr. Liu able to provide a speech, even in absentia.
Guests at the ceremony in Oslo’s City Hall listened instead to a recitation of his defiant yet gentle statement to a Chinese court before his incarceration last year. “I have no enemies and no hatred,” Mr. Liu said in “I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court,” read aloud by the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann. “Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience.”
Through his wife, Liu Xia, Mr. Liu sent word that he wanted to dedicate the award to the “lost souls” massacred in 1989 in Tiananmen Square.
Mr. Liu, 54, a professor, poet, essayist and campaigner for human rights, has been an irritant to the Chinese authorities since helping resolve confrontations between the police and students in Tiananmen Square. Mr. Liu was detained in December 2008, after co-writing the Charter 08 call for human rights and reform, and is currently serving an 11-year sentence for the crime of “incitement to the overthrow of the state power and socialist system and the people’s democratic dictatorship.”
He was named this year’s laureate because of his heroic and nonviolent struggles on behalf of democracy and human rights, said Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, adding that China needed to learn that with economic power came social and political responsibility.
“We can to a certain degree say that China with its 1.3 billion people is carrying mankind’s fate on its shoulders,” Mr. Jagland said in a speech at the ceremony. “If the country proves capable of developing a social market economy with full civil rights, this will have a huge favorable impact on the world.”
He added, “Many will ask whether China’s weakness — for all the strength the country is currently showing — is not manifested in the need to imprison a man for 11 years merely for expressing his opinions on how his country should be governed.”
Mr. Jagland, a former prime minister, became chairman of the Nobel committee last year and seems unafraid to use the position to make strong political statements. Last year’s selection of President Obama as the peace laureate was interpreted by many as a thinly veiled rebuke to the politics of former President George W. Bush, and this year’s award has had broad political implications.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Jagland said that on several occasions this fall, he and the Norwegian foreign minister were specifically warned by top Chinese officials not to give the award to Mr. Liu. But even though the committee disregarded their threats, Mr. Jagland said, its choice should not be interpreted as an insult to China.
Rather, Mr. Jagland said, its reasoning should be seen as similar to that of 1964, when the prize went to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was defying the authorities to fight for civil rights in America. The prize helped nudge the United States to change, Mr. Jagland said, and he hoped that it would have the same effect on China.
He said it was important that other countries stand up to China, in all its might. “The whole world is now benefiting from China’s economic growth, but we cannot only look to short-term commercial interests,” he said. “We need to uphold our own values.”
But China has reacted to the award with a mix of fury and derision, dismissing it as a “political farce.” It leaned hard on other countries to stay away from the Nobel ceremony (in the end, the committee said, 16 countries with ambassadors in Norway did not attend). It also denounced members of the Nobel committee as “clowns”; hastily organized its own, competing peace prize; shut down Web sites referring to Mr. Liu; and blacked out broadcasts and closed off access to the Web sites of foreign news media outlets like CNN and the BBC.
China also suspended bilateral trade negotiations with Norway, and has had no official contact with the country since October, Mr. Jagland said. And Norwegian exporters of salmon, for whom China is an important market, say that they have been informed that, starting next week, their fish will be subject to a slew of extra tests at Chinese ports.
With the world’s attention on Oslo, the authorities were coming down hard on Mr. Liu’s supporters in China. On Thursday in Beijing, Zhang Zuhua, a former official who helped write Charter 08, was forced into a vehicle by police officers, according to rights advocates, and dozens of other people were either confined to their homes or escorted out of the capital.
Blue construction panels were erected outside Mr. Liu’s apartment building, where his wife, Liu Xia, is being detained, apparently in an attempt to block it from the view of foreign reporters gathering outside. In a text message, one of Mr. Liu’s brothers, Liu Xiaoxuan, apologized for being unable to speak, saying that his phone was being monitored.
About 100 pro-Liu Chinese people came to Oslo to see the ceremony, either at City Hall or on a screen at the nearby Peace Center. One of them, a student who asked that his name not be used because he was afraid of reprisals back home, said that only a tiny percentage of his friends in China had even heard of Mr. Liu, and that many were so consumed with work and content with the country’s economic success that they had little time or sympathy for political dissent.
In the sentencing appeal read at the ceremony here, Mr. Liu told of his sorrow at being branded a “counterrevolutionary” and rendered essentially voiceless. “Merely for publishing different political views and taking part in a peaceful democracy movement, a teacher lost his lectern, a writer lost his right to publish and a public intellectual lost the opportunity to give talks publicly.”
But he praised China for making much progress, and praised his prison guards for treating him with compassion and humanity. He told of how he was sustained by his wife’s love — “the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to keep peace, openness and brightness in my heart.” He went on to say, “Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you.”
Mr. Obama issued a statement saying Mr. Liu was “far more deserving of this award than I was,” and calling for his release “as soon as possible.”
In City Hall, the audience was moved by Ms. Ullmann’s solemn reading of Mr. Liu’s words.
“Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth,” Mr. Liu’s statement said. As for “China’s endless literary inquisitions,” he said, “I hope I will be the last victim.”
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário