Agencies

Oslo/Islamabad

 

Nobel Peace Prize winners Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan and children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi of India yesterday urged closer co-operation between their two countries on education.

“The number of children who are out of school are mostly in India and Pakistan,” teenage education activist Malala said, adding that the two Asian countries also had many child labourers.

Malala, who was shot in the head by Taliban militants in Pakistan two years ago, has since lived in Britain, but said she aimed to return to Pakistan in the future.

And she said that winning the prize at the age of 17 was “not a pressure.”

“It’s strength, it’s encouragement, I feel much stronger now. Now I am not alone anymore,” she said at a news conference on the eve of the award ceremony in the Norwegian capital, Oslo.

The two laureates said they had hoped the prime ministers of India and Pakistan would have attended the ceremony.

“For me, the more important thing is the people-to-people relationship between India and Pakistan,” Satyarthi said.

“For sustainable peace it is important that the people must love and respect each other, and try to listen to each other,” he added.

Malala said she believed that India and Pakistan would benefit from closer ties after decades of rivalry, urging tolerance despite religious and other divides.

“Countries do have borders but it does not mean that they should then hate each other,” she said.

Satyarthi, 60, gave up a career in electrical engineering to fight against the scourge of child labour.

He said education was key to breaking “the vicious circle” of child labour and poverty.

Consumers in the west and other parts of the world should realise their “power” in ensuring that goods they buy met ethical and environmental standards, he said.

To spread education it was key to engage religious leaders and institutions as well, Satyarthi said.

Malala Yousafzai will become the youngest ever Nobel laureate in history when she gest her Nobel Peace Prize  today. Malala will become the second Pakistani Nobel Laureate after the late Dr Abdul Salam.

Pashto singer Sardar Ali Takkar will sing Pashto poem (Te Bibi Shireena Ye) for the first time ever in the Nobel Award ceremony today. The poem has been written by senior journalist Behroz Khan for Malala.

Though the entire world is proud of Malala who fought for the right of education for children, especially girls, there was hardly any celebration in Pakistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A few low profile functions were held in Peshawar and other parts of the country to pay tributes to Malala.

Awami National Party (ANP) deputy parliamentary leader Jaffar Shah submitted a resolution in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly in October to set up the Malala University in Swat to pay homage to the 17-year Malala, who belongs to Mingora in Swat district.

 The assembly, however, has yet to take up the resolution.

Malala, who was born in July 1997, was shot by the militants while going home from school in Mingora on October 9, 2012. The uniform she was wearing when she was shot has also been placed for exhibition in Oslo.

“Malala’s blood-stained uniform is a strong and heartbreaking symbol of the forces many girls are fighting for the right to go to school,” Bente Erichsen, executive director of Nobel Peace Centre, said in a statement.

“Despite her youth, Malala Yousafzai 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. This she did under the most dangerous circumstances.

Through her heroic struggle she has become a leading spokesperson for girls’ rights to education,” said the Nobel Committee when she was awarded the prize in October.

An ordinary girl from Swat, Malala shot to fame when she was nominated for the International Children Peace Prize by a Dutch organisation, Kidz Rights in October 2011. She was nominated for writing diaries for BBC, with the pen name of Gul Makai, in favour of girls’ education in Swat despite difficult circumstances prevailing there at the time.

Her first diary appeared on January 3, 2009 when she was only 12. Though she couldn’t win the Kidz Rights Award, a newspaper story prompted the then Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani to announce a cash reward as encouragement for Malala. She also won the first ever National Youth Peace Award.

The then chief minister of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Ameer Haider Hoti later announced a cash reward for her. The Sindh and Punjab governments and public and private organisations honoured Malala in their own way.

After coming into limelight, she was seen attending talk shows on television channels and giving interviews to local and international media, advocating girls’ education and vowing to bring an end to corruption in politics.

Despite threats to her life for publicly speaking out against Taliban, her family didn’t take precautionary steps that resulted in a shocking attack on her in Mingora town on October 9, 2012.