Rights activist Munir awarded 'Civil Courage Prize'
Rights activist Munir awarded 'Civil Courage Prize'
Agence France-Presse, New York
A Myanmar pro-democracy advocate who endured 15 years of imprisonment under the military junta and a murdered human rights campaigner in Indonesia were Monday named 2005 "Civil Courage Prize" winners.
The award is presented annually by the New York-based Northcote Parkinson Fund, a private foundation which supports economic and political liberalism and honors "steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk."
Min Ko Naing, a leader of the 1988 non-violent popular uprising against Myanmar's military dictatorship, was described by the Fund as "an indomitable campaigner for democracy" in the Southeast Asian nation.
He endured "15 years of imprisonment, suffering torture and solitary confinement," the Fund said in a statement ahead of an award ceremony on Oct. 11.
Min Ko Naing has been described as second in importance only to Nobel Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy icon currently under house arrest.
He was released from prison in November last year but is under government surveillance and unable to leave Yangon. He has declined his portion of the prize money of US$25,000, to be donated to a non-profit organization.
The prize would be posthumously awarded to Munir Said Thalib, Indonesia's best-known human rights campaigner.
He was murdered at age 38 by arsenic poisoning, en route to Amsterdam last September to take up a scholarship to study international law at Utrecht University. His killers have yet to be found or brought to justice.
Munir had formed a group to investigate the disappearance of activists at the hands of security forces and went on to become a searing critic of the Indonesian military, in particular of abuses in the regions of East Timor, Aceh and Papua.
Another Prize winner is Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who had exposed the atrocities of war in Chechnya in the face of death threats, intimidation, and poisoning, according to the Fund.