[Underscoring the hostilities the Nobel committee seemed to wish
to ease, troops from Pakistan and India had exchanged artillery and machine-gun
fire across their disputed Himalayan border in the days before the
announcement. The most recent eruption of fighting has so far killed 11
Pakistani and eight Indian villagers, but by Friday, a lull had set in, news
reports said.]
a
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| Malala Yousafzai, left, and Kailash Satyarthi won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Olivia Harris/Reuters; Adnan Abidi/Reuters |
Ms. Yousafzai, 17, is the youngest recipient of the prize since
it was created in 1901. Mr. Satyarthi is 60. The $1.1 million prize is to be
divided equally between them.
The award was announced in Oslo by Thorbjorn Jagland, the
committee’s chairman, who said: “The Nobel Committee regards it as 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.”
“Children must go to school and not be financially exploited,”
Mr. Jagland said. “It is a prerequisite for peaceful global development that
the rights of children and young people be respected. In conflict-ridden areas
in particular, the violation of children leads to the continuation of violence
from generation to generation.”
Class Dismissed: Malala’s Story
A 2009
documentary by Adam B. Ellick profiled Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl whose
school was shut down by the Taliban. Ms. Yousafzai was shot by a gunman on Oct.
9, 2012.
“Showing great personal
courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various
forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave
exploitation of children for financial gain,” Mr. Jagland said. “He has also
contributed to the development of important international conventions on
children’s rights.”
Despite his works, Mr. Satyarthi is not nearly so widely known
as Ms. Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for campaigning on behalf of
girls’ education in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. She was 15 at the time. Since
then, she has become a global emblem of her struggle,
celebrated on television and publishing a memoir.
She “has already fought for several years for the right of girls
to education and has shown by example that children and young people, too, can
contribute to improving their own situations,” Mr. Jagland said. “This she has
done under the most dangerous circumstances. Through her heroic struggle, she
has become a leading spokesperson for girls’ rights to education.”
Underscoring the hostilities the Nobel committee seemed to wish
to ease, troops from Pakistan and India had exchanged artillery and machine-gun
fire across their disputed Himalayan border in the days before the
announcement. The most recent eruption of fighting has so far killed 11
Pakistani and eight Indian villagers, but by Friday, a lull had set in, news
reports said.
In the speculation that invariably precedes the announcement of
the award, Ms. Yousafzai had been a favorite for two successive years. This
year, some forecasters spoke of Pope Francis, and others said it was likely the
committee would withhold the prize, as it last did during the Vietnam War in
1972 because the global horizon seemed so scarred by conflict.
The nomination of Ms. Yousafzai, however, seemed in part to be
intended as an inspirational message, offering a counterpoint to conflicts in
Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.
In a statement on Friday after the prize was awarded, Ban
Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said, “With her courage and
determination, Malala has shown what terrorists fear most: a girl with a
book."
Last year, Ms. Yousafzai won several European awards and published a memoir of her experiences, “I Am
Malala.” The title echoed the circumstances of her shooting. When the Taliban
gunman boarded her bus, he called out, “Who is Malala?” As she noted in an interview
last year, her voice is now heard “in every corner of the world.”
British news reports said Ms. Yousafzai was at school in
Birmingham, England, where she has lived since being treated for her gunshot
wounds, when the prize was announced and was taken out of her class to be
informed of the award.
In many ways, her story has come to symbolize the trauma of
modern Pakistan, as the nuclear-armed nation has struggled to reconcile the
opposing forces of violent Islamism and those who envision a progressive,
forward-facing future for their country.
Six days after the shooting, she was airlifted to a specialized
hospital in Birmingham.
The Taliban were the reason that Ms. Yousafzai had come to
public prominence. She wrote a blog in 2009 that detailed life in the Swat
Valley under Taliban rule, at a time when bearded fighters, armed with
Kalashnikovs, had terrorized the valley’s residents and made particular efforts
to shut schools where girls were being educated.
After the Taliban were expelled from Swat, Ms. Yousafzai went on
to become a national media figure. Ms. Yousafzai spoke passionately about the
need for peace and education for girls on television programs. She was
encouraged by her schoolmaster father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who had nurtured his
daughter as an outspoken advocate from an early age.
But that advocacy earned the wrath of the Taliban, which
convened a secret meeting to plan her assassination.
In the months after her recovery, Ms. Yousafzai took the first
steps toward establishing her global celebrity. She met with a President Obama
and his family in the White House and was lionized by a host of celebrities.
Back in Pakistan, however, things were less clear.
Conservative Pakistanis spread malicious stories claiming that Ms. Yousafzai’s
plight had been exaggerated by a gullible Western news media, or that she was
somehow in the employment of American intelligence. The Taliban vowed to
redouble their efforts to assassinate the schoolgirl should she ever return to
the country.
The conspiracy theories reflected broader tensions between
Pakistan and the United States. Although most Pakistanis prize education, and a
minority sympathizes with the Taliban, the rush by Western leaders to heap
praise on Ms. Yousafzai was seen by many as a rebuke of Pakistan at a time of
painful relations with the United States.
For all that, news of the Nobel
Prize on Friday
inspired jubilation and well-wishers in the Swat Valley, who spilled onto the
streets and distributed sweets in a traditional celebration.
“We have no words to express our feelings,” said Ahmad Shah, a
family friend, speaking by phone from Mingora, the main town in the region.
“Her efforts have been recognized by the world with this great prize. This is a
victory for the people of Swat and of Pakistan.”
Mr. Shah said he had spoken to Ms. Yousafzai’s exiled father,
who had called from England to gauge the reaction in the area.
For months after the attack on Ms. Yousafzai, some residents
criticized the schoolgirl, fearing publicity around her case would invite
further Taliban attacks. But now, Mr. Shah said he told Mr. Yousafzai by phone,
“even those who were opposing Malala are happy.”
Some residents, however, clung to the conspiracy theories that
have dogged Ms. Yousafzai’s reputation in Pakistan. “Her shooting was a
ready-made drama that was created by foreign powers,” said Ghulam Farooq, the
editor of a small local newspaper. “She has no real role in this Swat
conflict.”
In India, Mr. Satyarthi, a former engineer, has long been
associated with the struggle to free bonded laborers, some born into their
condition and others lured into servitude. For decades, he has sought to rid
India of child slavery and has liberated more than 75,000 bonded and child
laborers in the country.
Mr. Satyarthi began working for children’s rights in 1980 as the
general secretary of the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, an organization
dedicated to freeing bonded laborers forced to work to pay off debts, real or
imagined. He also founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save the Children
Mission, an organization dedicated to ending bonded labor and saving children
from trafficking.
“This is a very happy moment for every Indian,” he said in
comments airedon the Indian news channel NDTV on Friday. “If
with my humble efforts the voice of tens of millions of children in the world
who are living in servitude is being heard, congratulations to all.”
He emphasized that child labor “perpetuates poverty.”
“Poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labor and exploitation of children,” he said. “It’s a triangular relationship between child labor, poverty and illiteracy, and I have been trying to fight all of these things together.”
Mr. Satyarthi also founded the Mukti Ashram, or Liberation
Retreat, in the 1980s to teach bonded laborers, overwhelmingly children, new
trades so they could participate freely in the Indian economy.
He worked toward their release through Supreme Court orders and
saved children forced to embroider textiles in a factory in New Delhi, weave
carpets in Uttar Pradesh and toil on rice fields in Madhya Pradesh. His work
was at times dangerous, and he was assaulted by circus owners when he freed
Nepali children working in the Gonda district of Uttar Pradesh.
He has spoken passionately on the issue of child rights and on
the systemic forces, including the caste system, that contribute to bonded
labor in India.
“Caste, religion, the political system, the economic system —
all are helping the bonded labor owners,” Mr. Satyarthi said in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. “I
believe in Gandhi’s philosophy of the last man, that is, the bonded laborer is
the last man in Indian society, that we are here to liberate the last man.”
In 1998, he organized the
Global March Against Child Labor across 103 countries, which helped to pave the
way for an International Labor Organization convention on the worst forms of
child labor.
For the previous two years, the prize had been awarded to
international bodies: the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in
2013 and the European Union in 2012.
Alan
Cowell reported from Berlin, and Declan Walsh from Kabul, Afghanistan. Nida
Najar contributed reporting from New Delhi; Sana ul Haq from Swat Valley;
Pakistan, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan. Somini Sengupta contributed
reporting from New York.
