Posted on 12/10/2010 11:12:18 AM PST by James C. Bennett
NEW DELHI: After deep cogitation, India has decided to stand up to Chinese pressure and attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on Friday. Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is this year's recipient, and the Chinese government has been furious at anybody who wants to attend, warning them of "consequences",
Indian ambassador to Norway Banbit Roy will attend the ceremony on Friday, official sources said, as he has attended the peace prize ceremony over the past couple of years.
India has also delinked its attendance from the forthcoming visit of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao next week. This is significant, because it shows India is learning not to make all diplomatic activity into one long zero-sum story. The Chinese are liable to link it, however, as they have done with the Norwegians, breaking off trade talks with them.
India, though, stands at a different place. It was China that took potshots at Indian sovereignty and integrity by questioning the status of Jammu and Kashmir, by giving stapled visas to Indian citizens from that state. This has been India's biggest bugbear all of this year, but no amount of Indian warnings have had any effect on the Chinese. India even went to the extent of telling China that Kashmir was a "core" issue just as Tibet and Taiwan was to China, and silently promised its own "consequences".
On Wednesday, France joined the ranks of nations who will be present at the ceremony and Serbia dropped out, having been reminded by Beijing that it had supported Serbia on the Kosovo independence issue. Had India decided to absent itself on Friday, it would have been in august company -- three of US' major non-Nato allies (MNNA) have abandoned the shelter of the US to boycott the Nobel ceremony in deference to China. They are Pakistan, Philippines and Egypt.
On Wednesday too, Beijing announced its own version of a global peace prize -- the Confucius Peace Prize, whose first recipient is Lien Chan, former vice-president of Taiwan. Ostensibly set up by a group of Chinese professors, it's generally believed to be blessed by the Chinese Communist Party.
My History of US Foreign Relations instructor back in college always made the point that the U.S. made a mistake back in the Cold War by choosing to work harder towards an alliance with Pakistan than one towards India.
The choices were few.
After 1947, when the British left the Subcontinent, the opinion in the US was that a smaller, religiously united Pakistan would be a safer long-term bet than highly diverse, unstable, secular India. That, and the need of Pakistan’s territory to check Soviet intentions in the Middle East caused the tilt toward Pakistan.
As a partial consequence, and due to other reasons (such as Russia being the enemy’s enemy vis-a-vis China, and their readiness to export the kind of weaponry that the US prevented India from acquiring through Britain), India gravitated toward the Russians.
[ My History of US Foreign Relations instructor back in college always made the point that the U.S. made a mistake back in the Cold War by choosing to work harder towards an alliance with Pakistan than one towards India. ]
Yeah, we always seem to have disdain for democracies and republic and cozy up to dictators....
I for one am sick and tired of asian style politics.
I for one am thrilled that the Nobel committee corrected for its mistake of last year by honoring a truly deserving person and in doing so rubbed it in the face of Red China. That can’t be bad at all!
No doubt ! I am just sick of the way the ChiComms do things.
I don’t think anybody should be imprisoned for free speech or human rights, but this guy is hardly deserving of the Nobel Peace prize imho.
I’m not entirely sure when he switched to human rights activism as his main cause. But a cursory search shows that this guy spent a good decade writing about how Western and Japanese colonialism is good for China. He went as far as to say that China should be colonized by the west for 300 years for it’s own good.
I do not see how people from any non-western or developing country can view this in a positive light. And then there is the fact that he was clandestinely paid by the United States...
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/10/liu-xiaobo-and-the-300-years-problem/64916/
As usual the Nobel Peace Prize committee can be counted on to nominate the undeserving.
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