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	2019 Right Livelihood Award Laureates by Ole von Uexkull The Right Livelihood Foundation   Sep. 2019   The Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize', celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. The 2019 Award goes to Aminatou Haidar (Western Sahara), Guo Jianmei (China), Greta Thunberg (Sweden) and Davi Kopenawa / Hutukara Yanomami Association (Brazil). The Laureates were announced in Stockholm, Sweden.   Ole von Uexkull, Executive Director of the Right Livelihood Foundation, commented: 'With the 2019 Right Livelihood Award, we honour four practical visionaries whose leadership has empowered millions of people to defend their inalienable rights and to strive for a liveable future for all on planet Earth. Besides the prize money, we offer the Laureates long-term support and will help protect those whose lives and liberty are in danger'.   The international jury has selected four Laureates:   The human rights defender Aminatou Haidar (Western Sahara) receives the Right Livelihood Award for her steadfast nonviolent action, despite imprisonment and torture, in pursuit of justice and self-determination for the people of Western Sahara.   Over 30 years of peaceful campaigning for the independence of her homeland have earned Haidar the byname 'Sahrawi Gandhi'. Her dignity and resolve make her one of the most respected leaders among the Sahrawis. It is the first time that a Right Livelihood Award goes to a Laureate from Western Sahara.   Aminatou Haidar commented:   'I feel very honored to receive the renowned Right Livelihood Award. This is a recognition of my non-violent struggle and the just cause of the Sahrawi people. Despite military occupation and violations of fundamental human rights, they continue their peaceful struggle. The Sahrawis deserve to be supported by all so that, one day, they will achieve independence and freedom'.   The lawyer Guo Jianmei (China) receives the Right Livelihood Award for her pioneering and persistent work in securing women's rights in China.   Guo is one of the most distinguished lawyers in the field of women's rights in China. Throughout her career, she has helped thousands of disadvantaged women in getting access to justice.   Guo Jianmei commented:   'This award recognises and acknowledges the efforts of my team and me to uphold women's rights and promote democracy and the rule of law in China, under difficult circumstances for the past 25 years. Currently, pro bono legal work in China is facing enormous challenges. To stand firm, we will need more passion, courage, perseverance and commitment. This award serves as an encouragement and motivation'.   Climate activist Greta Thunberg (Sweden) receives the Right Livelihood Award for inspiring and amplifying political demands for urgent climate action reflecting scientific facts.   Thunberg is the powerful voice of a young generation that will have to bear the consequences of today's political failure to stop climate change. Her resolve to not put up with the looming climate disaster has inspired millions of peers to also raise their voices and demand immediate climate action.   Greta Thunberg commented:   'I'm deeply grateful for being one of the recipients of this great honour. But of course, whenever I receive an award, it is not me who is the winner. I am part of a global movement of school children, youth and adults of all ages who have decided to act in defence of our living planet. I share this award with them. The Right Livelihood Award is a huge recognition for Fridays For Future and the climate strike movement. Thank you so very much!'.   Indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa of the Yanomami people, and the Hutukara Yanomami Association (Brazil) jointly receive the Right Livelihood Award for their courageous determination to protect the forests and biodiversity of the Amazon, and the lands and culture of its indigenous peoples.   Kopenawa is one of the most respected indigenous leaders in Brazil. He has dedicated his life to protecting Yanomami rights, their culture and lands in the Amazon. Kopenawa is co-founder and President of the Hutukara Yanomami Association which is conserving the rainforest and advancing indigenous rights in Brazil.   Davi Kopenawa commented:   'I am very happy to receive the award. It comes just at the right time and it is a show of trust in me and Hutukara and all those who defend the forest and planet Earth. The Award gives me the strength to continue the fight to defend the soul of the Amazon forest. We, the peoples of the planet, need to preserve our cultural heritage as Omame [the Creator] taught to live well caring for our land so that future generations continue to use it'.   http://www.rightlivelihoodaward.org/   Stockholm, Nov. 30, 2015   Working together for a world without war, by Gino Strada, EMERGENCY NGO Founder, accepting the Right Livelihood Award in 2015.   'It is a honour for me to receive this prestigious award, that I consider a sign of appreciation for the outstanding work that the humanitarian organization EMERGENCY has done in the past 21 years in favour of the victims of war and poverty.   I am a surgeon. I have seen the wounded (and the dead) in several conflicts in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Latin America and in Europe. I have performed surgery on several thousands of people, injured by bullets, by shrapnel from bombs or rockets.   In Quetta, the Pakistani city close to the Afghan border, I met victims of antipersonnel mines for the first time. I performed surgery on many children injured by the so-called “toy mines”; small plastic green butterflies the size of a pack of cigarettes.   Scattered in the fields, these weapons wait for a curious child to pick them up and play with for a while, until the detonation occurs: one or both hands are blown away, burns over the chest, the face and the eyes. Armless and blind children. I still have vivid memories of those victims, and the view of those atrocities changed my life.   It took me time to accept the idea that a “war strategy” could include practices like deliberately targeting and maiming children in the “enemy’s Country”. Weapons designed not to kill but to inflict horrific suffering upon innocent children and posing a terrible burden to their families and their society.   For me, even today, those children are the living symbol of contemporary wars, a persistent form of terrorism against the civilian populations.   A few years later, in Kabul, I went through the files of about 1,200 patients, and discovered that less than 10 percent of them were likely to be combatants.   Ninety percent of the victims were civilians, one third of them children. Are they "the enemy"? Who pays the price of war?   In the past century, the percentage of civilian casualties has dramatically increased from approximately 15% in WWI to more than 60% in WWII. And in the more than 160 “major conflicts” that the planet has experienced after the end of WWII, that took the lives of more than 25 million people, the percentage of civilian victims has consistently been around ninety percent of the total, very much like the data from the afghan conflict.   Working in war torn regions for more than 25 years, I have witnessed this cruel and sad reality, perceived the magnitude of this social tragedy, of this carnage of civilians, mostly occurring in areas with almost non-existent health facilities.   Over the years, EMERGENCY has built and run surgical hospitals for war victims in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Sierra Leone and in many other Countries, then expanded its medical activities to include pediatric and maternity centers, rehabilitation centers, clinics and first-aid posts.   The origin and foundation of EMERGENCY back in 1994, did not derive from a set of principles and declarations. Rather, It was conceived on operating tables and in hospital wards.   Treating the wounded is neither generous nor merciful, it is only just. It has to be done.   In 21 years of activity, EMERGENCY has provided medical and surgical assistance to more than 6,5 million people. A drop in the ocean – you might say – but that drop has made a difference for many. Somehow it has also changed the lives of those who have shared the experience of EMERGENCY, like me.   Every time, in the different conflicts we have been working in, regardless of who was fighting against whom and for what reason, the result was always the same: war was nothing but killing of civilians, death, destruction . The tragedy of the victims is the only truth of war.   Confronted daily with this dreadful truth, we embraced the idea of a community where human relationships are founded on solidarity and mutual respect.   Indeed, this was the hope shared worldwide in the aftermath of the Second World War. This hope led to the establishment of the United Nations, as stated in the Preamble of the UN Charter: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.”   The indissoluble link between human rights and peace and the relation of mutual exclusion between war and rights were also stressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948.   “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and the “recognition of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”   70 years later that Declaration sounds provocative, offensive and clearly false. So far not one among the signatory States has completely implemented the universal rights they had committed to: the right to a dignified life, to a job and a home, to education and health care. In one word, the right to social justice. At the beginning of the new millennium there are no rights for all, but privileges for a few.   The single and most aberrant, widespread and persistent violation of human rights is the practice of war, in all its forms. By denying the right to stay alive, war denies all human rights.   I would like to stress once again that in most Countries ravaged by violence those who pay the price are women and men like us, nine times out of ten. We shall never forget this.   In the month of November 2015 alone, more than 4000 civilians have been killed in several Countries including Afghanistan, Egypt, France, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Syria, Somalia. Many more people have been wounded and maimed, or forced to flee from their homes.   Being a witness to the atrocities of war, I have seen how turning to violence has most of the times only brought in more violence and suffering. War is an act of terrorism, and terrorism is an act of war: they share a common denominator, the use of violence.   Sixty years later, we are still confronted with the dilemma posed in 1955 by leading world scientists in the so called Russell-Einstein Manifesto: “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” Can we have a world without war to guarantee a future to the human race?   Many would argue that wars have always existed. This is true but it does not prove in any way that the recourse to war is inevitable, nor can we assume that a world without war is unachievable. The fact that war has marked our past does not mean that it has to be part of our future as well.   As with illnesses, war should be considered as a problem to solve, not as our destiny.   As a doctor, I could compare war with cancer. Cancer vexes humanity and claims many victims: does this mean that all efforts of medicine are useless? On the contrary, it is exactly the persistence of this devastating disease that prompts us to increase the efforts to prevent and defeat it.   Conceiving a world without war is the most stimulating task that the human race is facing. It is also the most urgent.   Atomic scientists, through their Doomsday clock, are warning the human race: “The clock ticks now at just three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty—ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”   The biggest challenge for the coming decades is to imagine, design and implement the conditions that will allow us to reduce the recourse to force and to mass violence until they fully disappear. War, just like deadly diseases, has to be prevented and cured. Violence is not the right medicine: it does not cure the disease, it kills the patient. The abolition of war is the first indispensable step in this direction.   We may call it utopia, as it has never occurred before. However, the term utopia does not designate something absurd, but rather a possibility that still has to be explored and accomplished.   Many years ago even the abolition of slavery seemed “utopian”. In the XVIII century the “possession of slaves” was deemed as “normal”. A massive movement – gathering hundreds of million citizens over the years, decades and centuries – changed the perception of slavery: today we repel the idea of human beings chained and reduced to slavery. That utopia became true.   A world without war is another utopia we cannot wait any longer to see materialized. We must convince millions of people that abolishing war is urgently needed and achievable. This must penetrate deeply into our consciousness, until the idea of war becomes a taboo, expelled from human history.   Receiving the Right Livelihood Award encourages me personally, and Emergency as a whole, to multiply our efforts: caring for the victims and promoting a cultural movement for the abolition of war.   I take this opportunity to appeal to you all, to the community of the RLA laureates to join forces and support this initiative. Working together for a world without war is the best we can do for the generations to come.   http://en.emergency.it/culture-of-peace/abolishing-war-is-urgently-needed/ Visit the related web page
	We are losing, every single day of every single year, nearly 15,000 children under the age of 5 by Nicholas Freeland Development Pathways   COVID-19 is dangerous. But it is nowhere near as dangerous as having No Food to Eat (NOFUD-28). In the five months since the COVID-19 outbreak started, we have watched the number of worldwide deaths rise inexorably, representing a tragic loss to the families and friends of those afflicted.   But NOFUD-28 is the root cause of the death of more than 200,000 children under the age of 5 years every single fortnight (in other words, NOFUD-28 causes double the total number of COVID-19 deaths to date, every month of every year), most of them from easily preventable causes. Yet the global reaction to these two crises is observably, and shamefully, different.   First, the arrival of COVID-19 has sparked extraordinary measures in developed countries:   Schools are closed - yet almost none of the under-5s who die each year will even have visited a school, let alone received any education from one (and many of their parents, especially their mothers, will not have done either).   International travel is effectively banned - yet most of those who die from NOFUD-28 will not have ventured beyond the boundaries of their village, or perhaps, if they have been very fortunate, the nearest health post.   Employees are being asked to work remotely from home - yet most of those whose children die young have no work at all, or have only work that is seasonal, poorly-paid, irregular, exploitative or remote (but a different kind of remote!).   Scientists are working round the clock to find a cure to COVID-19 - yet most of the NOFUD-28 deaths are caused by easily curable diseases: a third of them from simple pneumonia or diarrhoea; and many of the rest from malaria, polio, even the plague, diseases which no longer even exist in high-income countries.   Hospitals with intensive care units and over 1,000 beds are being built, equipped and staffed in the space of 10 days - imagine how welcome one or two of those would be in countries which currently have less than 1 hospital bed per 1,000 citizens!   Information systems are in overdrive - we are now kept informed on an hourly basis about how many cases and how many deaths there have been from COVID-19.   People can quote these statistics from countries that they would be hard pushed to identify on a map. Yet we are only able to estimate to the nearest few hundred thousand how many under-5s die each year.   Second, COVID-19 has caused a rash of panic-buying.   The shelves of supermarkets in rich countries have been stripped of a variety of what are seen to be basic necessities, yet would be totally alien to those facing NOFUD-28.   Loo-rolls: most of the households whose infants die young would not know what to do with a loo-roll if you gave them one. Many would not even recognise a loo: more than 20 per cent of the population of low-income countries still defecate in the open (the figure is more than 25 per cent in India and over 50 per cent in Niger, Solomon Islands and Eritrea, for example).   Sanitiser gel: again these would be unrecognisable objects to poor households, where even soap is a rare luxury: in fact, soap is often one of the first non-food items a household will buy if it is given a gift or a social transfer. Most young NOFUD-28 victims would be taught to wash their hands with ash or mud.   Bottled water: empty plastic bottles are a treasured storage item for many of the poorest households, but the household members would never get to drink the water that originally came in those bottles: their water more often comes from stagnant ponds, polluted rivers, saline boreholes, or arsenic-laden wells.   Packets of flou: for most NOFUD-28 victims, flour doesn't come in packets: rather it has to be pounded from grains (of maize, rice, sorghum, etc.) in a tedious, energy-sapping daily grind, usually by women and girls.   Toothbrushes: most of our NOFUD-28 infants would love a toothbrush as a toy; but, globally, more people now own a cell-phone than a toothbrush. Those whose children are most likely to die young would use coal or twigs (typically of oak, neem or arak) to brush their teeth or just their finger smeared with mud from the wall of their hut.   Guns (yes, there was a run on gunshops in America!): whilst the efficacy of guns against COVID-19 is still unproven (clinical trials are ongoing), it is unlikely that they will be an effective response to NOFUD-28.   Finally, there are outpourings of global sympathy for every fatality of COVID-19. This is right, and as it should be: every life lost is a tragedy. We watch with horror as the number of deaths rises daily.   But it should be the same with NOFUD-28. We should be given a constant reminder that we are losing, every single day of every single year, nearly 15,000 children under the age of 5, with their entire lives ahead of them.   Who knows how many of them would have gone on to make a genuine contribution to society as medics, pioneers, researchers, artists, sportspersons, scientists, rappers, entrepreneurs? Cutting so many young lives short represents an appalling and unforgivable waste to our world.   So, yes, let's pull together to defeat COVID-19, and minimise the depredations that it is causing. But let's remember as it recedes, and as loo-rolls, sanitiser gel, bottled water and toothbrushes reappear on our civilised supermarket shelves, that there is a much more terrible tragedy unfolding out there, killing more than five million infants and babies each year, that could be resolved with a smaller effort, and at a much lower cost, than that currently being mobilised against COVID-19.   Let's take seriously the pledge of the Sustainable Development Goals (specifically SDG2) that by 2030 the phenomenon of NOFUD-28 will have been eradicated from our world.   Let's also recognise now that we will not achieve this by a return to 'normal': 'normal' is why we are in this mess in the first place. What we should be looking for is something much better, and it will require substantial changes from the 'normal'.   At global level, we clearly need global solutions to what are now undeniably global problems: we have pretended for too long that we can cosset our pampered selves in comfortable isolation from the faraway problems of poverty, deprivation and climate change. At national level, we need far more enlightened and compassionate leadership than that offered by most of the current crop of posturing popinjays pandering to populist prejudice.   We need progressive systems of wages and taxation which reward handsomely those on the front-line who really make a difference to our lives, and much less those whose contribution to society is notional, superficial or ephemeral. And finally, at personal level, we all need to recognise we have a very comfortable life in developed countries (even when deprived of loo-rolls, sanitiser gel, bottled water and flour!). We must snap out of our current insularity, complacency and egotism before we go the way of previous 'civilisations' that have succumbed to these same vicissitudes.   If we can make all these changes, we will have no difficulty overcoming COVID-19, then NOFUD-28. Then that can become our new normal. Visit the related web page
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