The surrounding world is not only problems, tragedies, accidents, and crises – without causes or preconditions to boot. It is just facts. Children die, wars continue, and crises deepen. As information is a click away, there is no time to look into and know about things. Or, maybe, there is no desire? A rhetorical question. All you have to do to see the truth is open your eyes. Sometimes a whole lifetime is not enough, but in some other cases three days, a few speeches by Nobel laureates and leaders of the most influential nongovernmental organizations will suffice.
One could take an eye-opening course past week in Warsaw at the 13th annual Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. It is no mere chance that this venue was chosen: thirty years ago Lech Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The idea of holding a summit that would bring together laureates and civil society representatives belongs to Mikhail Gorbachev who advanced it in 1999. The three days of this year’s summit saw six open discussions and 15 workshops that involved Lech Walesa, Frederik Willem de Klerk, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Muhammad Yunus, Shirin Ebadi, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, and Betty Williams. Central Europe has not yet seen so many Nobel Peace Prize recipients in one place at a time. Gorbachev failed to come to Warsaw due to deteriorating health.
What is worth pondering over in 2013? Over the causes and effects of Middle East wars, the use of nuclear weapons, poverty eradication, immigration, human rights protection, exploitation of third-world people, environmental pollution, and globalization, Nobel laureates say. Here follow the main ideas and quotes that are really worth pondering over because the problems of our world is everybody’s concern – we are all in the same boat.
1. WAR DOES NOT RESULT IN PEACE
Ira Helfand, co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, says that “Nuclear weapons pose a vast threat to our society.” He recalled in his speech that there are 17,000 nuclear warheads in the world. This number of weapons is not at all justified, and political leaders are unable to control them. To illustrate this, Helfand gave the following example: if India and Pakistan began a nuclear war and used at least 100 nuclear warheads, the conflict would take a death toll of about 20 million people, and the climatic change caused by the explosion would last for about 25 years and claim another 1.5 billion human lives.
In his words, theses weapons are ruinous not only when they are being used. Firstly, they need considerable money to be maintained and, secondly, the availability of these weapons seems to be prompting states to a confrontation. The 1976 Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire expressed it in her speech as follows: “Should there be wars in the Middle East only because the Pentagon and Russia have so much weaponry to be used? And should people die because of this?” His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama also shared this viewpoint. “Hatred, wrath, and malice have never solved any problems,” he said.
2. A COMMON FOUNDATION MAKES A RELIABLE BUILDING
If we are planning to create a single “we,” we must have something in common, former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa believes. He said more than once during the three-day summit: “We should draw up a list of ten common values irrespective of culture or faith differences. If we are planning to build a united Europe, we must think about the foundation, for it is impossible to build a house on so different foundations.” It is still a question whether ten values will suffice and how to bring all negotiators together.
3. PEACE OF MIND AND LOVE FOR YOUR NEIGHBOR
It is only in harmony with ourselves and the people around us that we can achieve a common goal, former South Africa president Frederik de Klerk believes. Paraphrasing the summit’s motto “Stand in Solidarity for Peace – Time to Act,” he noted: “The essence of solidarity is that we must respect ourselves and treat our neighbor as one of us.” His Holiness Dalai Lama advises us to be better not only externally, but also internally if we are to achieve this solidarity because “peace of mind and inner beauty are important for physical health and self-development.”
4. EQUAL RIGHTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
It is difficult to believe that there are countries in the 21st century, where woman still lacks enough rights. But in Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to drive a car, and birth certificates began to be issued to women only ten years ago. The Iranian women’s rights champion Shirin Ebadi stressed that, contrary to Western persuasions, it is not Islam that forms the basis of women’s discrimination. “Like other religions, Islam can be interpreted in different ways,” she says. Discrimination is based on Oriental patriarchal culture and despotic government in the countries, Ebadi recalls that Iranian women lost many of their rights after the 1979 revolution. For example, the value of a woman’s life is half that of a man. How do women resist this? By way of education! Most higher education students in Iran are women.
5. EDUCATION IS THE STRONGEST WEAPON
Nobel laureates suggest using the “weapon” of Iranian women worldwide. It was emphasized more than once here that it is important that everybody should have access to education. What we often take for granted – a daily walk to school – is out of reach for a considerable part of the world’s population. It is education and knowledge that must become the weapon which will help win the race for peace.
6. POVERTY IS NOT THE FAULT OF PEOPLE, FOR THEY ARE JUST VICTIMS
What may serve as a model action aimed at solving present-day social problems is the activity of Grameen Bank founded by the 2006 Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. He developed a system of microcredits in Bangladesh and set up the so-called poor people’s bank, where no sureties or collaterals are needed in order to borrow money. “I have been doing something opposite to what conventional banks do. They work for the rich, but the poor are in the majority… I dream that there will be no poverty at all in the world and that we will create a ‘poverty museum’ by 2030, for people will no longer have this thing in their life and will only see poverty in the museum,” the economist says.
“Poverty is the fault of society, the individual is just a victim of poverty,” Yunus maintains. “Sometimes I give the analogy of a bonsai tree. You take the seed of the tallest tree in the forest and you put it in a flower pot: only a small, one meter high tree will grow. We call it bonsai. It looks very cute. But it doesn’t grow tall. What is the problem? We didn’t give it enough soil to grow. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with the seed. Society simply never gave them the space so that they could grow.”
7. BAN ON EXPLOITATION
It is a shocking fact that a Bangladeshi woman earns 11 cents. “Multinational companies are boosting their capitals, leaving their workers in misery,” Yunus says indignantly. The truth is that the ideal capitalist system is not ideal at least because it is unable to exist in a capitalist environment and grows by exploiting cheap labor. Yunus suggests raising the wages rate at least to a dollar per hour and attaching a tag on the clothes which says that this firm does not use third-world citizens as cheap labor.
8. TRUST YOURSELF AND DO NOT GIVE UP!
The main thing in any face-off is not to hang your head and believe in your victory. Lech Walesa proved by his example that one can change anything if one is striving for this and doing their utmost to achieve the goal. “More often than not, we can hear it said in Europe that we cannot manage to solve a certain concrete problem, that it is impossible, etc. But I would like to persuade everybody that in reality there are no things impossible. And the challenges that Europe and the world are facing are not so difficult – they just differ from the ones that existed before,” said the former electrician who became leader of the Solidarity trade union movement.
And what would you say if you were asked what the No.1 problem of humankind is today? I would say indifference and egoism. For the root cause of almost all our problems may be described in terms of these two notions. So it is not mere chance that South Africa’s former president Frederik de Klerk emphasized the following: “We must not be egoists and should ask ourselves: what can I do to improve the life of people around me, to make my country and the world better?”
Let us make our world better! And we will see the result in a year’s time! In Cape Town! Until we meet in the South African Republic! These slogans flourished as the 13th Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Warsaw drew to a close.
