Myanmar has one of the most challenging environments for the practice of journalism in Asia.  With its history of military rule and weak civic institutions, the effort to build a strong, independent, and socially responsible press has to contend with draconian laws, rabid intolerance, repression and persecution.  It is an environment that calls for journalists of uncommon will, professional independence, and a strong sense of justice.

Such a journalist is forty-one-year-old KO SWE WIN.  Born to a poor family in Yangon, he grew up in politically turbulent times and fell victim to state repression early on.  In 1998, he was a university student when he was arrested with sixty-seven others for participating in a student demonstration and distributing propaganda materials against the ruling military junta.  Sentenced to twenty-one years in jail, he was tortured and starved but would turn prison into a learning experience.  He studied English, deepened his Buddhist faith, and did a lot of meditation.  Released after seven years in prison, he studied journalism, doing an online undergraduate program and with a scholarship, finished a master’s degree in journalism at Hong Kong University in 2009.   He worked for a magazine in Thailand, and then, intent on being “where the action was,” returned to Yangon in 2012.

In Yangon, he started as a stringer for Al Jazeera and New York Times and even set up a short-lived, self-financed internet news service. The first important opportunity came when Myanmar Now was launched in 2015, with seed financing from the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Myanmar Now is an independent online news service focused on long-form investigative reports in both Burmese and English, available for syndication.  With SWE WIN as editor-in-chief since 2016, the news service has built a strong reputation for well-researched, in-depth articles on critically selected, underreported human rights and social justice issues.

SWE WIN has continued to face daunting challenges. In 2017, he criticized a powerful, ultranationalist Buddhist monk, Ashin Wirathu, for purveying “hate speech” and publicly commending the killer of a Muslim human rights activist.  Wirathu, SWE WIN wrote, had desecrated Buddhism and should be punished for endorsing assassination and fomenting hate.  SWE WIN was sued for defamation, physically assaulted by Wirathu’s supporters, and briefly jailed on the trumped-up charge that he tried to leave the country while on bail.  Illustrating how the law can be bent by the powerful, the trial was held in a location that required SWE WIN to take a 780-mile road trip to and from the trial, which was purposely dragged out such that SWE WIN had to do a total of seventy-one trips at great personal inconvenience and cost.  A case of blatant harassment, the judge finally dropped the case on July 2, 2019 for the plaintiff’s protracted non-appearance at court hearings.

SWE WIN and Myanmar Now draw strength from the fact that they are making a difference.  With a current readership of 350,000, the news service is highly regarded for the quality, balance, and depth of its reporting on high-impact issues, including land grabbing, child labor, and abuse of domestic workers.  It exposed anomalies in the Myanmar Human Rights Commission; in a political indoctrination program ran by the army for civil servants; in the secret operation of some fifty prison labor camps where prisoners are made to work in quarries and mines; and in the activities of the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, a movement of xenophobic, anti-Muslim extremists.  SWE WIN is encouraged that public awareness has been raised and government has responded positively in a number of cases, punishing officials or changing policies.

A growing problem in Myanmar and the world, SWE WIN says, is “intolerance and hostility towards different races and nationalities being exploited as a political weapon.”  “Only the promotion of human rights,” he says, “can help us contain this deplorable trend.”

In electing KO SWE WIN to receive the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his undaunted commitment to practice independent, ethical, and socially engaged journalism in Myanmar; his incorruptible sense of justice and unflinching pursuit of the truth in crucial but underreported issues; and his resolute insistence that it is in the quality and force of media’s truth-telling that we can convincingly protect human rights in the world.

First, I would like to thank Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for giving me this prestigious award in Asia.

But I feel deeply humbled by the fact that there are so many out there in our country and various parts of the world ”more selfless and more honest than I am but who have been never recognized for the services they render to their respective societies.

I am the seventh person from Myanmar ”and the second journalist ”to receive this award. The first Myanmar journalist and one of the earliest recipients of this award is Mr. Edward Michael Law-Yone, who founded the Nation newspaper in 1948. That was one of the most influential newspapers in Southeast Asia.

After the first military coup in 1962, Michael Law-Yone was jailed for five years and later forced to leave the country. Professional journalism had been lost in our country since then. The state of oppression, which forced Mr. Law-Yone to leave his beloved country, has relaxed to some extent following some democratic changes initiated since 2011.

According to the current constitution, however, the military remains the most dominant force, which controls key ministries and holds one quarter of seats in the legislature.

The predominance of the military’s role, combined with the continued armed clashes in a number of ethnic minorities and the rise of nationalism, is the major challenge facing the independent media in Myanmar.  This situation constantly instills a sense of threat into civil life and the news media circle.

But having passed through various political and social turbulences over the past decades, we have developed a great resilience and a tremendous amount of patience for the problems in our country. None of the people I know in Myanmar expect change to happen overnight, but we have a firm belief that we are not on the right path towards democracy and liberty as long as the supremacy of civilian rule has not come into fruition.

In this context, journalism plays a crucial role ”the kind of journalism that seeks the truth, that protects the fundamental rights of human beings, that is not colored by political and religious dogmas and, above all, that is driven not by animosities against anyone or any entity but by a great compassion for the most unfortunate communities and individuals in a society.

Even though an independent press or press freedom is mostly a by-product of a democratic political system, we are confident that the press can play a vibrant causal role for the growth of democracy and liberty in Myanmar and many other countries in Asia.

In a country known for its rich musical culture and blessed with a surfeit of musical talent, to stand out as singular and indispensable is truly outstanding.  In the Philippines today such a musical leader is RAYMUNDO “RYAN” PUJANTE CAYABYAB.

Born in Manila, one of four siblings, RYAN’s father was a government employee, his mother an opera singer and music teacher. Though the family’s circumstances were modest, theirs was a home filled with music, particularly since his mother took in music students as boarders.  Everyone in the house seemed to be either singing or playing an instrument, and RYAN grew up listening to classical music, opera arias, and traditional native songs.  Heeding his mother’s admonitions to shun the musician’s financially unrewarding career, RYAN took up a business management course, but to help pay for his university studies he took on side jobs as pianist or accompanist for musical artists. The parents of one such artist were so impressed with his talent that they gave RYAN a full scholarship to pursue a degree in music instead.  From this point on, music would be his life-work.

Versatile, a consummate professional, and universally liked, RYAN CAYABYAB is virtually omnipresent in the Philippine music industry today.  For over four decades, his contributions as a composer, arranger, music director, conductor, performer, and educator have been huge.  RYAN started to write music in the late 1970s, making his mark when his signature song “Kay Ganda ng Ating Musika” (How Beautiful is Our Music) won the grand prize in the first Metro Manila Popular Music Festival (Metropop) in 1978 and in an international song festival in South Korea in the same year.  He went on to win in other competitions and performed widely in the Philippines and abroad.  As head and artistic director of the San Miguel Foundation for the Performing Arts, he acted as conductor, arranger, and composer of its award-winning Philharmonic Orchestra and Master Chorale.  Subsequently, he would be involved in training singers and music groups that have won significant national and international recognition.

At home in diverse genres and media—choral and orchestral works, musical theater, opera and ballet, television programs, film scores, commercial recordings of popular music—RYAN has influenced the shaping of Philippine music culture.  An instance is the role he has played in the Original Pilipino Music (OPM) movement to promote a culturally distinct, contemporary Filipino popular music.  The movement arose in the 1970s with the Metropop, continuing to this day with Philippine Pop Music Festival (Philpop).  RYAN has played a leading role in these and other festivals, which have been important in inspiring and promoting thousands of singers and songwriters in the country.

RYAN is driven by a passion to mentor, educate, and contribute to the flourishing of Filipino musical talent.  He has served in the music faculty of the University of the Philippines, runs a music studio with his wife, and has conducted free workshops for thousands of students all across the country. He is a moving force in the Philpop Musicfest Foundation and the Elements Music Camp, major initiatives dedicated to music training, promoting Filipino music abroad, and fostering Filipino cultural identity through music. Honored in 2018 as Philippine National Artist for Music, he was cited for his music that “extols the exuberance of life and human happiness, thus capturing the very essence of our Filipino soul.”

An inspiration and guiding light to many, RYAN says, “The next generation should be better than us for our country to move forward.  For this to happen we must teach them everything we know at every possible instance.  I like teaching, I like sharing what I know, and I like playing music.  When I’m doing all these, I’m very happy.”

In electing RAYMUNDO PUJANTE CAYABYAB to receive the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his compositions and performances that have defined and inspired Filipino popular music across generations; his indomitable, undeterred confidence to selflessly seek, mentor and promote young Filipino musical genius for the global stage; and his showing us all that music can indeed instill pride and joy, and unify people across the many barriers that divide them.

The first song I ever wrote was based on a poem I found in the notebook of a school mate. I was twelve years old and a freshman in high school.  I had no idea that this was the start of a creative music writing career. And even if my mother, an opera singer, dissuaded all her children to take up a career in music, it was here that I found my calling. Songwriters are chroniclers who write about their happiness, their sorrows, their surroundings, their country, their aspirations and anxieties. They mirror everything that happens around them, including socio-political changes in society, and write personal stories in the context of their milieu, in a language that transcends time and barriers.

When I was starting out as a teacher at the U.P. College of Music in Diliman, I realized immediately that this was what I would like to do: spend my life teaching music. Teaching all I know, to young musicians. My wife and I even started to operate a small music school, teaching non-degree courses in music performance and creative music writing just to feed a simple desire. A professional musician once asked me, “Aren’t you afraid that by teaching everything you know you are actually divulging trade secrets?”  Because of this remark it became even clearer to me why I wanted to teach. There really are no trade secrets; but even if there were, I would divulge them anyway.

Teaching can transform lives. I want everyone I teach to discover their maximum potential. I also want them to be better than me. And because I think this was the basic track that I wanted to take, I was able to influence many of my younger colleagues in the music industry to adopt the same vision: to enable the new generation of songwriters to be better than our generation, so that our music community can to move forward, and thus bring the entire creative music industry to new heights, and hopefully help the country to move forward by becoming leaders and songwriters of new music for the world to hear.

Another very compelling vision I share with many of my colleagues is this goal to make the Filipino public aware that our original music is not only a form of entertainment but a living tradition. It is the binding ‘glue’ that forms, strengthens and positively moves the Filipino community, thus rendering it vital and essential to keep on making, promoting and supporting Filipino-made music.  Moreover, it contributes to the vibrant music movement happening in the entire Asian region affecting the lives of its people.

Thank you for this honor bestowed upon me. Thank you to the board of trustees. I share this award with all my colleagues in the music industry who tirelessly give their time to help accomplish our goal of discovering and training future generations of creative songwriters; and to writing new works to contribute to the music literature of our country and of the world.

A predominantly Muslim region in a staunchly Buddhist country, southern Thailand has struggled with religious and ethnic conflict since a separatist insurgency rocked the region in 1948.  Insurgency and militarization have exacted a heavy toll: it is reported that of the more than 6,000 people killed in the conflict since 2004, some ninety percent of these were civilians. These deaths have included the unsolved killings of more than thirty civil society and human rights activists.  One of the more sensational of these killings was the “enforced disappearance” in 2004 of noted human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit, who was abducted in Bangkok the day after he had publicly accused the military of torturing detainees in southern Thailand.

Somchai’s enforced disappearance and subsequent death was a tragic blow to the cause of human rights in the country, and a devastating personal nightmare for his family.  But it would also be the beginning of a remarkable journey for Somchai’s widow, ANGKHANA NEELAPAIJIT, herself a Muslim Thai of humble origins. When her husband “disappeared” ANGKHANA was a housewife looking after their five young children and a small business. Thrust into a dangerous and public controversy, she valiantly worked to bring the police officers involved to trial, but due to a flawed justice system they were acquitted.  Despite the death threats she received, ANGKHANA continued to seek justice for her husband and other human rights victims.  She applied herself to learning the laws, filing legal appeals, and navigating the Thai legal system.  She bonded with other victims, and worked with civil society groups in and outside Thailand.

In 2009, with the help of non-government organizations and her own family, ANGKHANA founded Justice for Peace Foundation (JPF), a network of human rights and peace advocates that has done important work in documenting the human rights situation in southern Thailand, thus raising public awareness and putting pressure on government to act on human rights cases; providing legal assistance to victims; and training women on human rights and the peace process.  In a vital initiative, JPF and other groups pushed for laws that will criminalize torture and enforced disappearances (current Thai law recognizes murder only if the body could be found). Their steadfast lobbying succeeded in getting the Thai government to sign and ratify the United Nations Convention Against Torture in 2007, and the Convention to Protect All Persons from Enforced Disappearance in 2012—already major victories even though the implementing rules have yet to be issued.

In 2015, ANGKHANA was named commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand, the only commission member with grassroots human rights experience.  Despite the skepticism of government critics, ANGKHANA has taken her appointment seriously, firmly committed to taking the peaceful, legal approach to fighting human rights abuses and to doing what she can in “pushing the limits.”  Quietly non-confrontational, she does not waver in speaking her mind against injustice. As commissioner, she has successfully interceded with the authorities for detainees to have access to lawyers and their families, and for victims to get financial compensation.  She firmly took action on cases of arbitrary arrest and detention and the exercise of freedom of expression and assembly.  She has widened her advocacy to address problems like forced child marriages, trafficking of women, and the rights of asylum seekers and refugees.  ANGKHANA’s term as commissioner ended in July 2019, but there is no doubt she will remain involved in human rights advocacy.  This is for her a deeply personal advocacy.

People have marveled at the transformation of this self-effacing housewife into a leading human rights defender.  But ANGKHANA herself is not surprised.  In her soft-spoken and measured tone she asserts: “Most women experience conflict and violence in a different way than men.  They also develop unique skills for resisting, addressing and preventing conflict.  The work on justice and peace cannot afford to neglect the constructive contributions of women.”

In electing ANGKHANA NEELAPAIJIT to receive the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her unwavering courage in seeking justice for her husband and many other victims of violence and conflict in southern Thailand; her systematic, unflagging work to reform a flawed and unfair legal system, and the shining she is proof that the humblest ordinary person can achieve national impact in deterring human rights abuses.

Today is one of the biggest days of my life. I am truly humbled and proud to stand before such honorable guests to accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award. I would like to express my sincerest appreciation and thanks to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for this honor.

For me, the honor I receive today is not a symbol of victory, or the end of my and other survivors’ struggles for rights and justice. It represents a recognition of the continuing struggle for human rights, justice, freedom, democracy and the rule of law of all survivors of human rights abuses in my country and in our region. Also, it means that the voice of victims should be heard.

As a survivor of a human rights violation and a woman human rights defender, I realize that rights, dignity and human values are very important to all human beings. The continuation of the culture of impunity, militarization, failure of the justice system and the social acceptance of those violations are crucial contexts that have kept many victims live in suffering and fear.

While leading a civil society organization, I had the opportunity to work with many vulnerable groups, especially the vulnerable of the vulnerable such as victims of human rights violations in Southern Thailand, most of whom are women, refugees and asylum seekers or grievous women who are victims of gender-based violence. As a former human rights commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand, I had the opportunity to work mostly on civil and political rights and women’s rights. I found that many human rights challenges faced by Thailand and other Asian countries—such as violent extremism, poverty, refugee crisis, absence or lack of freedom of expression—are only the tip of the iceberg.

Colleagues, history tells us again and again of the impact that ordinary heroes bring. Extraordinary in their courage, determination and commitment they serve as evidence that every one of us can make a difference to stand for what is right and just. Each and every one of us has a choice to work to promote the upside rather than the downside of humanity. We all have a sense of responsibility towards each other to respect our diversities while protecting our equality. All of us have a hero inside us that is able to recognize the beauty in all of humanity.

Again, I would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation for this prestigious award. Thank you, too, to my colleagues and friends who have always supported me in my work as a WHRDs and a human rights commissioner. Last but not least, special thanks to my family, my father and my children who always stand by me and trust in everything I do.

My honor today as Magsaysay awardee has shown the story of an ordinary woman’s struggle for justice, democracy and the rule of law and—this is a big change for women, for families and for the nation.

For much of the twentieth century, Thailand was led by military men as governments shifted coup after coup. Even so, democracy slowly took hold. A new constitution in 1997 enshrined civilian governance and popular representation through elections. The kingdom’s democratic transition now seems complete. Yet today, democracy and “money politics” have created a new power matrix in Thailand. “We have never had a government with such authority and power,” says Senator JON UNGPHAKORN, noting that the voices of many Thai citizens remain unheard. As a member of Thailand’s upper house, he is raising those voices. 

Born in London in 1947, UNGPHAKORN trained as an engineer in England but made his life in Thailand, where his father, Puey Ungphakorn, was an enlightened architect of the modern Thai state and an early Ramon Magsaysay Awardee. UNGPHAKORN began his own career as a lecturer at Mahidol University but, in the politically turbulent 1970s, turned his attention to social issues. In 1980 he founded the Thai Volunteer Service to expose privileged university graduates to the country’s rural poor and to the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that were working among them. UNGPHAKORN helped the new NGOs to manage and fund their projects and, as he did so, played a key role in knitting Thailand’s nascent civil society together. 

Responding early to the presence of HIV/AIDS in Thailand, in 1991 UNGPHAKORN founded the AIDS-Access Foundation. He pioneered in providing confidential counseling for people with HIV/AIDS and their families, in fighting the public stigma of AIDS, and in asserting the rights of everyone to effective and affordable treatment. As chair of the NGO Coalition on AIDS, he fostered collaboration and helped build an effective network for advocacy. 

When Thailand’s new constitution opened the Senate to election in 2000, Ungphakorn mobilized supporters from the NGO and HIV/AIDS communities and won a seat. He says frankly that “No one listens to NGOs, but if you are elected senator . . . everyone is interested.” 

The Thai Senate does not initiate legislation but plays an important role in monitoring government and shaping the country’s laws. As a member of the Health Committee and the Social Development and Human Security Committee, UNGPHAKORN used his position to advance the concerns of Thailand’s marginalized citizens, making shrewd use of the press to publicize critical committee findings that might otherwise have been shelved or buried in the slow-moving legislative process. As he did so, UNGPHAKORN prioritized Thailand’s HIV/AIDS community — by working to include HIV/AIDS patients in the country’s new “30-baht-per-visit” national health scheme; by supporting the lawsuit against Bristol-Myers Squibb that opened the door for Thailand to produce a critical anti-HIV drug at half the cost; and by prevailing upon the government to ban a food supplement being callously advertised as an AIDS miracle drug. 

But UNGPHAKORN has also used his senatorial authority to expose the brutal hand of the government toward Muslim communities in southern Thailand, and to uphold the rights of rural folk whose livelihoods are threatened by property speculators and scandal-ridden dams, power plants, and mines. He has inveighed against the death penalty, against intellectual-property-rights agreements that disadvantage poor Thais, and against a national press that has failed, he says, to report “violence perpetrated by the state apparatus [and] the violation of human rights.”

UNGPKHAKORN is not alone in pressing these concerns. But he and his like-minded senators are in a minority. Most senators bow to the government, he says. But UNGPHAKORN knows that his constituency and his heart lie elsewhere. “I was elected by NGOs and the HIV/AIDS community,” he says. “They set the agenda. I give them support.?”

In electing JON UNGPHAKORN to receive the 2005 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his impassioned insistence as a senator that Thailand respect the rights and attend humanely to the needs of its least advantaged citizens.

The honorable Chief Justice Davide, Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen:

Forty years ago today, in his response to receiving the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, my father, Dr. Puey Ungphakorn, referred to my youngest brother Giles, then aged 12 and a stamp collector. Giles had quoted to my father a part of Ramon Magsaysay’s Credo which he had learned from a commemorative postage stamp the part which translates into English as “I believe that he who has less in life should have more in law.”

Today, I also have a story to tell about Giles, now a university lecturer and political activist. I learned very recently that when Giles was approached for information about me during the nomination process, he asked whether it would be possible not to nominate me, but to nominate Somchai Nilapaijit instead. I could not agree with him more. 

Somchai was President of the Thai Muslim Lawyers Association and a civil rights lawyer who made great sacrifices to provide the best legal services for Muslim defendants, often people whom Ramon Magsaysay would have described as having less in life. He paid the ultimate sacrifice on March 12th 2004 when he was abducted from his car in Bangkok, never to be seen or heard of again. This occurred soon after he started a signature campaign calling for martial law to be lifted from three southern provinces, and just after he petitioned a Senate committee to investigate allegations that five people whom he was defending had been tortured by police in order to obtain false confessions. Five policemen were later arrested on charges relating to his abduction and are presently on trial, but it is unlikely that those who gave the orders for his demise will be uncovered in the near future. 

Unfortunately, the regulations of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation do not allow for posthumous nominations, and so here I am now, receiving this great honor which I dedicate first and foremost to lawyer Somchai and his family. 

The present Constitution of my country, Thailand, guarantees the civil rights and democratic freedoms of individuals and communities on a par with the most democratic countries of the world. Yet since its promulgation eight years ago, Thailand has seen some of the worst human rights and civil rights abuses in recent history. The disappearance of lawyer Somchai is just one example. 

Our Constitution guarantees the rights of communities to participate in the management and conservation of their own natural resources and environment, and to receive a fair hearing regarding any development projects which might adversely affect them. Yet not only have these community rights been widely ignored and natural resources such as land, forest, and water been grabbed away from communities, but at least 15 community leaders from all regions of the country have been assassinated since 2001 for trying to protect their communities against environmental destruction by outsiders with vested interests. They received little protection or recognition from the state for serving the interests of their communities and of society as a whole, and in most cases the perpetrators of their deaths have remained unpunished. It is therefore important that I should dedicate my award to all of them for their courage and sacrifice. 

Since January 2004, violence in the southernmost provinces of Thailand has escalated out of control. Brutal killings of innocent people by terrorists believed to be members of separatist groups have become an everyday occurrence. At the same time, numerous reports of unlawful practices by police and military units against Muslims in these provinces including allegations of abductions, torture, and killings, have caused widespread resentment and distrust of security forces among the local population. The unclear circumstances surrounding the deaths of 19 members of the Sabayoi youth football team in April 2004 and the deaths, while in military custody, of 78 demonstrators arrested at Tak Bai six months later are extremely disturbing events to all who respect the values that form the foundations of our Constitution. 

I would therefore like to additionally dedicate my award to all those who are working for peace and justice in the southern provinces, including members of the National Reconciliation Commission headed by Ramon Magsaysay Awardee, Anand Panyarachun. 

I also dedicate my award to all civil society activists, whether from NGOs or peoples’ organizations, who are working under difficult circumstances for social justice, respect for human rights, empowerment of the powerless, and equitable management of natural resources; including all my friends and colleagues in the Thai Volunteer Service network, the Thai NGO Coalition on AIDS and the national and regional networks of people living with HIV/AIDS. 

Furthermore, I would like to dedicate this award to all those struggling for media and press freedom in Thailand in accordance with Articles 39 and 41 of our Constitution. This includes those journalists and media people who have managed to maintain the ethical standards of their profession by reporting news in a straightforward manner and not giving in to various forms of intimidation. It also includes those-such as the ITV news staff, several radio news commentators, and some newspaper journalists-who have been victimized for their integrity, as well as Supinya Klangnarong of the Campaign for Media Reform who is being sued for damages of well over 1,000 times her annual income together with the Thai Post newspaper. 

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to dedicate my award to all fellow members of the Thai Senate who have performed their duties in strict accordance with their oath of office; that is to say, with honesty, for the benefit of the people, and by adhering to the principles of our Constitution. 

Finally, it only remains for me to express my gratitude to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for giving me the opportunity to accept this award on behalf of so many people striving to make Thailand a better place to live for all.

Few crimes are so vicious as acid throwing. When flung upon the face, common acids used by jewelers and in battery shops and tanneries melt the skin and eat into the bone and eyes, leaving victims permanently disfigured. A life of ostracism and shame awaits them. In Bangladesh, some three hundred people each year lose their natural-born faces in such attacks. Most of them are young women who have offended their attackers by denying them sex or marriage or suitable dowries. But others are maimed in family feuds or land disputes or local rivalries. This hideous crime is new to Bangladesh and has grown alarmingly in the past decade. As editor of Bangladesh’s largest-circulation Bangla-language newspaper, MATIUR RAHMAN has stirred the nation to respond. 

RAHMAN was born in 1944 and grew up in the era of decolonization and fervent nationalism that gave birth to East Pakistan and then Bangladesh. He became a Marxist and, for twenty-one years, edited Dhaka’s socialist weekly Ekota. When communism’s failures gave him second thoughts, he withdrew from leftist politics to concentrate on journalism. In 1998 he founded Prothom Alo, or First Light, a daily newspaper. Rahman established Prothom Alo‘s credibility by exposing the missteps of both the government and its foes, and by aggressively covering corruption, terrorism, and human rights violations. The newspaper’s constructive advocacy and RAHMAN’s own unsparing editorials attracted legions of readers. Today it reaches two million of them. 

Prothom Alo naturally covered the alarming rise of acid throwing in Bangladesh. But in 2000 a heartrending case involving a fifteen-year-old girl riveted RAHMAN’s attention. He determined to harness the resources of his newspaper to fight the scourge. 

In prominent daily appeals, RAHMAN declared war on acid throwers and called upon his readers to contribute to the Prothom Alo Aid Fund for acid victims. With scarred women at his side, he solicited donations at rallies and press conferences and called upon celebrities and volunteers to carry the appeal throughout the country. People from all walks of life and even Bangladeshis abroad became donors. RAHMAN acknowledged each small gift in the newspaper and steered help directly to the victims: money for burn treatments, plastic surgery, legal fees, and living expenses, plus new dwellings for some and income-generating assets such as milking cows, sewing machines, cultivable lands, and shops for others. At the same time, Prothom Alo pressured the government to strengthen laws against acid attacks and the reckless sale of dangerous chemicals. 

The response to RAHMAN’s appeal reassured him that “the society is not sleeping.” By June 2005, some 8.2 million taka had been coursed to over one hundred victims. Moreover, in 2002 the country’s Acid Crimes Prevention Act and Acid Control Act stiffened penalties for acid throwers and tightened licensing requirements for acid sales. 

RAHMAN has been described as “the navigator of positive social and cultural change” in Bangladesh. He has used his authority as editor of Prothom Alo not only to fight the crime of acid throwing but also to raise public consciousness about HIV/AIDS and drug abuse, and to reveal the role of certain Muslim extremists in fomenting militancy and violence. His provocative independence comes at a price. He is regularly harassed and threatened, and the government itself has withdrawn advertising from his newspaper and taken him to court in reprisal for Prothom Alo‘s critical reporting. 

Despite these pressures, RAHMAN aspires to no other vocation. Readers look to Prothom Alo as “a hope against hope,” he says. “I work to use it for the cause of the people.”

In electing MATIUR RAHMAN to receive the 2005 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his wielding the power of the press to crusade against acid throwing and to stir Bangladeshis to help its many victims.

This auspicious ceremony will remain as one of the most joyous moments in my life and in the life of those who helped to build the daily Prothom Alo. We are grateful to the Roman Magsaysay Award Foundation for honoring the paper and myself with such a prestigious award. 

The world of mass media today is in turmoil. The post World War II intellectual edifice of international laws, norms and practices are today under serious challenge as the bipolar world learns to deal with one super power in the international scene. The war on terror and the traditional values of liberalism and open society, on which the Western media flourished for so long, are on an apparent collision course. There are clear signs of erosion on the fundamental values of individual freedom and national independence under the pressure to ensure national security, both real and imaginary. 

In the developing world new social and economic challenges, the ever-increasing burden of poverty and the marginalization of the poor have brought the media into deeper questions about their relevance and purpose. Rising corruption, the nexus between politics and crime, disregard for the law by the rich and the powerful and the clear danger of social outburst caused by neglect and continued discrimination have revealed, as never before, the possible constructive role that an independent and socially committed media can play. 

It is within these changing times and demands that the role of Prothom Alo has to be judged. From the very outset we were fully aware that Bangladesh needed a more independent media voice than was so far available. The country needed a newspaper that was bolder in its articulation of the problems that faced us, and more imaginative in its thinking as to how to solve them. Encompassing it all, we needed a more socially responsible newspaper that combined the core value of press freedom with the goal of democracy and people’s prosperity. 

Thus was Prothom Alo born, and thus has grown its relevance, credibility and popularity. “People” are at the center of our journalism. We never forget for a moment that they are our strength, and it is for them that we exist. Hence, all our energies are devoted to making the paper closer to the needs of the masses. 

We do not dwell on dreams alone; we lend a helping hand to the people, we stand by them in solving their day-to-day problems. 

Following are examples of some of the initiatives we took. 

1. For the scholastic development of children, Prothom Alo helped the national committee for the Mathematics Olympiad in raising funds and in organizing regional and national Mathematics Olympiad competitions across the country for the last three years. A total of fifteen thousand students have participated in 2004-2005. For the first time, a team from Bangladesh participated in the World Mathematics Olympiad in Mexico. 

2. We started a campaign to increase sensitivity towards the Bangla language and culture by initiating language competitions at the regional and national levels. Four thousand students from 333 schools participated in this program.Besides this, we regularly help young students to organize debates all over the country. 

3. During the terrible flood last year, a cross section of people deposited in cash and in kind aid for flood victims that amounted to US$166,700. We distributed food and clothing in 44 districts. When the floodwaters receded, we, as part of our rehabilitation effort, distributed bamboo, wood, and seeds and fertilizer for farming, as well as chairs, tables and other amenities for schools; doctors were sent and medicines were distributed. 

4. We helped Tipu Sultan, a journalist severely injured by the political cadres, in association with The Daily Star, by raising the money needed for his treatment. 

5. By raising funds we have also extended our help to children and young students affected by cancer and other pernicious diseases. 

It is these positive, constructive and timely interventions that have made Prothom Alo a symbol of hope to our people. 

In accepting the honor that you have bestowed upon us, we promise to commit ourselves further to serve our people to gain greater freedom and prosperity. We will strive to expand our social commitment and take up newer roles in the area of human rights and economic development. 

I would like to declare that one-third of the award money will go to the Prothom Alo Aid Fund for acid victims, one-third will be deposited to the anti-drug and HIV awareness campaign, and the rest will be used to create a new fund for deceased and injured journalists who are victims of political persecution. 

The Ramon Magsaysay Award will certainly inspire all who are a part of Prothom Alo. We will continue our work for the transformation of society. Our main ethos is: “Wherever there is good, Prothom Alo is with it.” We will remain true to this goal.

The armed standoff between India and Pakistan has endured for more than fifty years, bringing with it four outright wars and continuing upheaval. Its flashpoint is Kashmir, claimed by both sides, but its roots lie in the shocking communal violence of Partition in 1947. In the years since then, memories of this disturbing event have fueled religion-infused nationalism and militarism in both countries and kept millions of fearful people poised for war. Today, both sides boast nuclear weapons and the stakes are global. The problem seems intractable. But IBN ABDUR REHMAN of Pakistan and LAXMINARAYAN RAMDAS of India believe there is hope. As leaders of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy, they are building popular support for peace on both sides of the border. 

ABDUR REHMAN, a Punjabi Muslim born in 1930, was away at Aligarh University in 1947 when Partition violence erupted in his hometown and several members of his family were killed by rampaging communalists. LAXMINARAYAN RAMDAS, a Hindu from Mumbai, was fourteen at the time and living in Delhi. He remembers angry mobs threatening his parents for protecting a Muslim family. REHMAN was obliged to migrate to Pakistan with his father. In Lahore, he found his vocation in journalism, rising from post to post at leading Pakistani publications to become chief editor of the Pakistan Times in 1989. RAMDAS became a cadet at India’s Armed Forces Academy in Dehradun and, later, the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. He rose from command to command until, in 1990, he was named chief of India’s navy. 

By 1993, REHMAN had left The Times, under pressure for criticizing the government, and Ramdas had retired and acquired a Pakistani son-in-law. As tensions again rose between India and Pakistan, both men sought to influence their countries to change course. In September 1994, REHMAN joined twenty-four like-minded Indians and Pakistanis in Lahore to open a public dialogue for reconciliation and peace. This led to the formation of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy. REHMAN became founding chair of the Pakistan branch; RAMDAS was named vice-chair of the India branch and became chair in 1996. Both men guided the organization until 2003. 

The Forum’s chief weapon was dialogue. In a series of conventions beginning in 1995, it drew hundreds of Indians and Pakistanis together to promote demilitarization, denuclearization, and peace and to publish resolutions insisting upon mutual arms reductions and troop pullbacks; an end to cross-border provocations; and a “peaceful, democratic solution” in Kashmir. Meeting alternately in Pakistan and India, the conventions sustained this dialogue for ten years and more as the Forum’s base grew to embrace a web of environmental, human rights, trade union, and women’s rights activists as well as concerned citizens from the academe, industry, and the professions. 

During the same years, the Forum organized people-to-people delegations of lawmakers, diplomats, soldiers, artists, and students to open friendly talk channels between Indians and Pakistanis and to counteract propaganda in each country stigmatizing the other. And it campaigned for the liberalization of travel between the two countries and for the revision of hate-filled school textbooks. At another level, Forum leaders such as REHMAN and Ramdas worked behind the scenes with national leaders and opinion makers to promote the peace agenda. The Forum’s mission is not grandiose. “It is enough,” REHMAN says, “to contribute in easing the tension between the two countries by providing opportunities for people to meet.”

For REHMAN, the Forum’s peace initiative grew naturally from his work as one of Pakistan’s leading human rights advocates and as longtime director of the internationally esteemed Pakistan Human Rights Commission. In this role and also as a journalist, REHMAN has devoted decades to exposing systemic violations of the rights of women, children, workers, and minorities in Pakistan and to fighting corruption and the abuse of power. He has been a champion of democracy as a secular ideal in a country where, he says, “authoritarianism has been the rule and short-lived democratic facades an exception.” All this at considerable personal risk and sacrifice. As for India and Pakistan, he calls upon both countries to reject their “pathological obsession with the politics of hostility.” 

RAMDAS says, “I entered the armed services as a hawk and exited as a dove.” His military career made him intimately familiar with the limitations of military solutions to political problems. This led to his role in the Forum. Still, India’s explosion of a test atomic bomb in May 1998, RAMDAS says, “was one of the greatest turning points in my life.” In July, he signed a public declaration by retired military men declaring that “nuclear weapons should be banished from the South Asian region, and indeed from the entire globe.” With his wife, Lalita, he threw himself into the antinuclear cause, warning Indians and Pakistanis alike about their country’s unreliable “control and command systems” and about the naivete of nuclear deterrence.” Touring and speaking extensively, he exhorted everyone to guard against the seductiveness of solutions “through super-violence.”

RAMDAS and REHMAN both connect the problem of peace in the subcontinent to dangerous ideologies that associate religion with nationalism and patriotism, and to militarism and other antidemocratic forces. REHMAN rues his own country’s “absence of genuinely democratic institutions.” And RAMDAS has linked recent political trends in India to “the path to fascism.” Both have been smeared as traitors, but they are not moved. It is time to stop the belligerent shouting and listen to other voices, they say. When it comes to war and peace, REHMAN likes to say, “I believe the people are a little ahead of the governments.” 

In electing IBN ABDUR REHMAN and LAXMINARAYAN RAMDAS to receive the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes their reaching across a hostile border to nurture a citizen-based consensus for peace between Pakistan and India.

Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation Distinguished Guests, Fellow Awardees and Dear Friends. 

I am extremely grateful to the trustees of Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for selecting me as one of the two winners of the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding. While I am overwhelmed by the honour done to me, I accept this award on behalf of thousands of supporters of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy, who have struggled for a whole decade to find democratic and peaceful solutions for the problems that have bedeviled the people of not only India and Pakistan but the whole of the South Asian region. 

You are all familiar with the history of conflict and confrontation between two of South Asia’s largest states, the wars they have fought and the large scale diversion of their resources as preparation for bigger conflicts. The struggle for peace between these two neighbours has acquired much greater urgency since both of them acquired nuclear weapons and started a prohibitively expensive missile race. 

It has been our experience in South Asia that absence of armed conflict does not amount to peace. For five decades the governments of Pakistan and India have been frittering away their resources on preparations for war and the people have been paying a heavy price in the name of defence even during periods when there is no fighting along the borders. It has also been our experience that peace is not an ideal that can be pursued in isolation from other concerns of the people. That is why the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy has from the outset viewed peace as part of a comprehensive package that includes disarmament and denuclearization, democratic governance, promotion of a culture of tolerance and resistance to extremism in the name of belief and ideology, and democratic resolution of matters such as Kashmir. During the last couple of years forces of peace and justice across the globe have come under strain as a result of substitution of the ideal of peace with the gospel of security. South Asia too has faced attempts to devalue peace. 

While facing these challenges we are sustained by the support of a very large number of ordinary women and men in both countries who do not correspond to the images of Indian and Pakistani people the world media carries everyday. These people who constitute a majority in South Asia are neither blood-thirsty fundamentalists nor intolerant zealots out to convert the world. They live by their labour and are striving to realize their dreams of a better life for their children. I am happy that the honour done to my dear friend Admiral Ramdas in India and myself will enable the world to recognize these peaceful millions and also encourage them to pursue the goal of peace and their fulfillment. 

I thank you again for the honour.

By the time SUKHO CHOI was born in 1955, ten years had passed since Korea was partitioned at the end of World War II and two had passed since the Korean War and its carnage had come to a halt-without reuniting the country. His was a rigid world of North and South. As he came of age, his own home of South Korea made a successful transition to democracy and rose to industrial prosperity; North Korea, meanwhile, descended deeply into isolation and poverty. The two societies lived worlds apart, their otherness reinforced by the Cold War and its stigmatizing propaganda. CHOI concluded it need not be so. As a Buddhist monk and leader of South Korea’s Jung To Society, he has advanced the cause of reconciliation. 

SUKHO CHOI entered the Buddhist monkhood as a youth but abandoned his robes to join South Korea’s democracy movement. On two occasions he was arrested and tortured. As the movement prevailed, Choi turned from political issues to social ones. He formed the Jung To (or Blessed Land) Society to apply Buddhist teachings to the full range of modern ills, from greed and poverty to environmental degradation. In 1991, he was ordained a Buddhist monk and thus became the Venerable POMNYUN SUNIM, the name he is known by today. 

During the next several years, CHOI and his group established a free school and a medical center and village development program in Dongeshwari, a sixteen-village hamlet of untouchables in a destitute corner of India. But CHOI was increasingly consumed by matters closer to home. 

North Korea was long accustomed to dearth. But the 1990s brought floods and drought and by mid-decade people were starving. Tens of thousands of them fled across the border to China. CHOI visited these “food refugees” repeatedly and surveyed five hundred of them in 1997 and 1998. From them he learned the desperate circumstances of their lives in China and the appalling dimensions of the famine in North Korea. He calculated some three million people had died. 

As his organization assisted the refugees, CHOI raised the alarm at home. “People are dying,” he told South Koreans. “More than were killed during the whole Korean War. It’s happening right now, right at this moment.” He urged them to put aside their fears and suspicions and to help the North Korean people. This, he said, was the true path to reconciliation and reunification. They responded by donating some two million dollars for food aid and thousands of articles of clothing for North Koreans. One million of them also petitioned the South Korean government to send massive quantities of food and medicine to the North. Meanwhile, CHOI carried his message to relief organizations and governments abroad, beseeching them to increase their efforts in North Korea and to end Cold War embargoes. In New York, his local followers committed themselves to assist North Korean farmers with fertilizer, seeds, and tools and to build a factory there that now supplies essential nutrients for eleven thousand children. 

CHOI’s ongoing advocacy and relief efforts reflect his belief that Buddhists must engage the real world and act to relieve suffering. He does so in concert with other engaged Buddhists around the world and also with like-minded Buddhist and Christian NGOs in Korea. 

All of this is part of CHOI’s larger vision for “a new humane society” that also reconciles people with nature. Like the good teacher he is, SUKHO CHOI—the ever-smiling Venerable POMNYUN SUNIM—can convey his complex vision simply. What the world really needs, he says, is “Pure Minds, Good Friends, and Clean Lands.” 

In electing SUKHO CHOI to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his compassionate attention to the human cost of Korea’s bitter division and his hopeful appeal for reconciliation.

It is a great honour for me to have been selected as the recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding this year, but I only have done what I had to do as a monk and indeed I do feel that I am unworthy of the award. I have realized, however, that this award is not given only to myself, but to everyone who took part in the humanitarian assistance to North Korea and the process of reconciliation. I accept this award on behalf of everyone who has been involved in the due course and I would like to express my profound appreciation to the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for giving me this award and to everyone who is here today. Also, I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to all the other awardees tonight. 

I hope this award will create more interest in achieving peace on the Korean peninsula in the international community and that together we can harbour peace and expand humanitarian assistance and protection of the North Korean refugees. It should be given to the North Koreans who are still going through very difficult times. Furthermore, there are conflicts and wars still going on even as I speak in some parts of the world. For the sake of everyone who is suffering from wars, disasters and ideological conflicts, I hope that they will be resolved soon. Peace Movement starts from understanding and recognising their differences and to be awakened to the fact that we are all connected as one. Hence, we all need to make a transition from relationships of competition and hostility to harmonious ones. Upon receiving this award, I shall put my best efforts forward to realize peace in Asia and the Korean peninsula. 

In closing, let me express my sincere gratitude to the late President Magsaysay in whose memory these awards were established. I would also like to express my respect for the people of the Philippines, for having such an honourable award. I thank everyone who is gathered here today, and in the name of the Lord Buddha and the teachers of humanity, I pray that there will be peace, love and happiness among all living beings. 

Thank you very much.

The Silk Road once linked East Asia to Western Europe and hosted flourishing oases of high art and civilization all along its great length. Today, many remnants of its brilliant past lie in ruin. The same is true of countless other cultural artifacts around the world. Whose responsibility is it to care for these treasures? Professor IKUO HIRAYAMA believes that they are the inheritance of the entire world; the entire world, therefore, should join in caring for them. He is setting the example.

Born in 1930, HIRAYAMA was attending middle school in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb destroyed the city and killed many of his schoolmates and teachers. He went on to study Japanese painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music) and joined the school’s faculty in 1952. Suffering badly from radiation sickness a few years later, HIRAYAMA endured a crisis that led to a spiritual awakening and recovery. He expressed his breakthrough in a painting depicting the seventh-century monk Xuanzang, bearing the message of Buddha across the Silk Road to China, from whence it reached Japan. HIRAYAMA’s interest in Buddhism’s origins and its path to Japan influenced his paintings for years to come and led him to explore the Silk Road for himself.

Year after year, he did so. All along the fabled route he encountered long-neglected Buddhist shrines and works of art. In Dunhuang, northwest China, he saw hundreds of cliff-side grottoes filled with ancient Buddha images and bright paintings-priceless antiquities that China lacked the resources to protect. HIRAYAMA pondered this. Each one of the Silk Road’s historic entrepots and pilgrimage sites had contributed to the passage of Buddhism to Japan. This insight led HIRAYAMA to persuade the Japanese government to underwrite and equip a groundbreaking research and restoration project at the Dunhuang Caves.

But there were so many sites like the Dunhuang Caves in Asia. Some of them, like the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, lay in countries beset by turbulence and without the means or will to protect them. What was needed, HIRAYAMA decided, was an international campaign to save cultural treasures wherever they existed. By this time, his paintings had brought him fame and wealth, and he was a professor (and later president) of a prestigious art school. HIRAYAMA now put these assets to use as an activist for cultural preservation.

He spearheaded international efforts to rehabilitate Angkor Wat in Cambodia and to safeguard the ancient Korguryo tomb frescoes of North Korea. He helped rescue Chinese artifacts from the Yangtze River flood of 1998 and, in the city of Nanjing, fostered Chinese-Japanese reconciliation by recruiting Japanese volunteers to help rebuild the ancient city ramparts. He funded French-led efforts to save war-threatened treasures in Afghanistan’s national museum and led an international appeal to the Taliban not to destroy the unique Bamiyan Buddhas. And much more.

HIRAYAMA channels his collaborative efforts through his own foundation and through governments, international organizations, and UNESCO, for whom he serves as a Goodwill Ambassador. Exhibitions of his paintings, in Japan and abroad, arouse public interest and generate funds for restoration projects. He has committed many millions of dollars personally.

HIRAYAMA believes that restoring works of art goes hand-in-hand with restoring human societies. Projects like those in Cambodia must always include training for members of the host community so that, in time, they can assume the restoration work themselves. This, he says, helps damaged societies to reestablish kinship with their own past and, in doing so, “restore their humanity.”

In electing IKUO HIRAYAMA to receive the 2001 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his efforts to promote peace and international cooperation by fostering a common bond of stewardship for the world’s cultural treasures.

Your Excellency Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, President of the Philippines, Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is indeed a great honor and privilege for me to have been selected as this year’s recipient of the world-renowned Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding.

First of all, I should like to express my heartfelt gratitude and deepest appreciation to the members of the Foundation and to all of you gathered here today. I should especially like to offer my warm congratulations to the other award honorees.

I was exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. At the time I was in my third year of junior high school. I miraculously escaped death, although I suffered for some time from the after effects of nuclear exposure. This experience — feeling firsthand the suffering and devastation caused by war — motivated me to create my artistic works in the pursuit of lasting peace.

In 1962, I was awarded a UNESCO Fellowship, which I used to study European Art. Later on, I had the pleasure of expressing my gratitude to UNESCO by providing 100 Hirayama Silk Road Fellowships for Young Scholars over a period of 10 years. As Goodwill Ambassador of UNESCO, I also made humble efforts to safeguard the Angkor Monuments in Cambodia and the Dunhuang Grottoes in China. Currently, I am engaged in the preservation of artistic works of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and of the Koguryo Tombs’ mural paintings in D.P.R. Korea.

Through our shared efforts to preserve outstanding cultural properties for future generations and to strengthen cultural exchanges among the world’s people, I firmly believe that together we can promote a culture of peace and mutual understanding. To help achieve this goal, I have been advocating the “Red Cross Spirit for Cultural Heritage” and joint activities “to promote peace through culture.”

This highly prestigious Award encourages me to continue my work dedicated to the cause of peace.

In closing, let me express once again my profound sense of appreciation for having received this award. I should also like to express my great respect for the late President Magsaysay, in whose memory these awards were established. Finally, please allow me to wish further prosperity and wellbeing to all those gathered here today and to the people of the Philippines, under the capable leadership of your President.

Thank you very much.

We are familiar with corruption in high places. But what about corruption in low places? For example, how much of the development aid earmarked for Asia’s rural poor every year actually reaches the poor? Huge sums are involved. In India, the government spends some $200 million annually for rural assistance in the state of Rajasthan alone. This is where ARUNA ROY and the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS, Organization for the Empowerment of Workers and Peasants) have been helping poor villagers find out where the money goes. They do so by asserting the people’s right to a single powerful weapon: information. 

As a junior officer in India’s prestigious Administrative Service, ARUNA ROY was exposed to her country’s diverse, poverty-stricken village world. She learned that she could not easily penetrate it, or change its ways, as an elite official. After seven years, she resigned from the Service and in 1974 moved to Rajasthan. There she joined the Social Work and Research Center (SWRC), a voluntary agency led by her husband and engaged in village-level development projects on health, education, gender, and livelihood. Her experience at SWRC convinced her that poor people must be the agents of their own economic and social improvement and, moreover, that political action is fundamental to their success. 

With this in mind, ROY and some fellow activists formed MKSS in 1990. Headquartered in the village of Devdungri, Rajasthan, their group accepted no external funds and spurned the trappings of prosperous NGOs. Living as the poor lived and eating as the poor ate, ROY and her comrades began assisting villagers to assert themselves against the local power structure. 

Using traditional forms of protest such as hunger strikes and sit-ins, MKSS-led villagers insisted that local people hired for state projects be paid the legal minimum wage. They forced a land-grabbing feudal lord to return encroached-upon properties to the entitled poor. Most provocatively, they held open-air public hearings at which official records of state development projects were exposed to the scrutiny of the intended beneficiaries. 

Shocking revelations followed: of toilets, schoolhouses, and health clinics recorded as paid for but never constructed; of improvements to wells, irrigation canals, and roads that remained noticeably unimproved; of famine and drought relief services never rendered; and of wages paid to workers who had been dead for years. Of the many development projects pursued by MKSS in Rajasthan, said one member, “not one has come out clean.” Such revelations embarrassed culpable officials and led to apologies and investigations and even to the return of stolen funds. 

Information was the key to every success: bills, vouchers, employment rolls. People have the right to audit their leaders, MKSS said. Thus, its campaign of public hearings also became a campaign for transparency in government. “Our money, our records,” chanted villagers. 

But officials were loathe to open their books. This prompted ROY and MKSS to launch a series of rallies culminating in a fifty-three-day protest in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, to compel the state to make its development-fund records public. The movement soon took on India-wide dimensions as the media and prominent intellectuals and political reformers joined in. As a result, right-to-information laws have now been passed in Rajasthan and three other states. A comprehensive national law is pending before the Government of India. 

ROY and her colleagues practice the transparency they preach, accounting scrupulously for their own expenditures to rural neighbors. At fifty-four, ROY remains driven. If an issue or a situation disturbs her, she says, “I am not comfortable until I do something about it.” 

In electing ARUNA ROY to receive the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her empowering Indian villagers to claim what is rightfully theirs by upholding and exercising the people’s right to information.

It is a great honor to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Though I have been singled out to receive the award, it in fact belongs to the many women and men with whom I have had the good fortune to share struggles and emerging visions for a better world. No individual, however endowed, can bring about social change on their own. Community work is a collective exercise, and the greatest potential and challenge of the human condition is to work together to realize dreams far beyond the barriers of individual limitations. It is my conviction that this is true for the work we do, the ideas we generate, as well as the leadership we create. 

One of the colossal tragedies that we face today is that in a world of plenty, we still have countless people who live in conditions of abject poverty and deprivation. Can we create conditions where our fellow citizens have an equal opportunity to contribute not just their labor, but also their knowledge, understanding and intelligent perception of change? Can we effectively challenge the established norms that limit the contribution of human beings because of hierarchies of exclusion? Are we willing to critically examine our own roles in perpetuating systems of exploitation through our actions and our silences? Do we not have equal rights to benefit from the common heritage of our planet? Can we work out the modes that will allow us to move towards an order based on the principles of justice and equality? Who will do so? How will we do it? 

I do not think any of us doubt the need to increase our levels of participation and involvement in issues of common interest. The universal attraction of democratic principles is that sovereignty rests with the people. But democracy is meaningful only when its specifics are worked out. 

The principles of democracy are universal. But for ordinary people, it is the practice of democracy that defines the principles. The socio-political circumstances of Asian countries like India, provide the opportunity to make democracy a vehicle of change, in which the collective wisdom of people is given the sanctity it deserves. Democratic struggle becomes both an end and a means to a more participatory form of governance. It is in this attempt to change from subjects to being the actual masters that the campaign for the people’s right to information took root in rural Rajasthan. Their collective understanding and contribution has changed the perspective of an academic and esoteric issue into a potent tool and principle of living. 

It has been a process that has illustrated the potential of relatively small groups of people working together to wage an ethical struggle against far more powerful adversaries. 

I feel honored most of all because I see this award as a recognition of those processes. The struggle in Rajasthan has not only drawn strength from community participation, but also from the understanding that communities, acting together to provide leadership, have greater resilience, energy and creativity than any individual. 

I come here today to accept this award, on behalf of the organizations I work with in Rajasthan and the many others in India who have energized this ongoing struggle. The cash prize will go to a trust recently set up to support individuals and organizations engaged in similar democratic struggles. 

I would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for providing a platform with which to share our perceptions. I also take the opportunity to urge the Foundation to include the eligibility of collectives and organizations in the category of Community Leadership. For it is to the collectives of ordinary people, the issues and processes they have fought for, and the greatness of their human spirit that this recognition truly belongs. Thank you.

Any government whose funds are chronically inadequate must ensure their appropriate and efficient use. Waste and corruption are a curse that cripples most newly independent countries, and ineffective fiscal accountability is an international problem. Yet the task of holding government departments accountable often devolves upon an auditor, whose office is a bureaucratic backwater with limited mandate, and whose reports are ignored. 

Such was the situation in Malaysia until May 1976 when TAN SRI AHMAD NOORDIN, already extended beyond normal retirement as Deputy Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, became Auditor- General. His was a surprise appointment: he lacked a university degree and was the first to be selected from outside the Audit Department. 

NOORDIN was born February 18,1921, in a small kampong (village) in the northeastern state of Kelantan, into a traditional Islamic family. His education began in a rural Malay school and continued in a government English school until halted by Japanese occupation of the peninsula in 1941. After World War II, while supporting a family as a clerk in the Price Control Office, he studied nights and weekends. In 1947 he passed the Cambridge School Certificate Examination which enabled him to join the Kelantan State Civil Service. Eight years later, just before Malaysia became independent from Britain, he entered the Federal Civil Service and earned distinction in successive posts for his searching mind, capacity for innovation, integrity and hard work. 

With his appointment as Auditor-General nine years ago, NOORDIN began to make an indelible mark on government. The law requiring a report on the accuracy of state and federal accounts he found too narrow. Declaring “my clarion call is to propagate the concept of public accountability,” he persuaded parliament to amend the Audit Act of 1957, thus enabling his office to ascertain whether funds were actually used as appropriated and managed efficiently. 

Concentrating upon performance auditing, NOORDIN shattered the complacency of bureaucrats and politicians. His first audit in 1977 uncovered abuses ranging from procurement of much overpriced noodles by the army, to discrepancies in Ministry of Education grants totaling nearly US$35 million. But the role of an auditor, he believes, is to “analyze the weaknesses which give rise to such faults, and secure cooperation of the heads of the audited organizations to rectify them and to strengthen their internal controls in order to prevent recurrence.” 

In 1982 Malaysia was rocked by a scandal involving almost US$1 billion in bad loans by the Hong Kong subsidiary of the state-owned Bank Bumiputra. Public doubt of the government’s ability to investigate its own financial institution was met by appointment of a three-member special committee of inquiry with NOORDIN as chairman. Its blunt, extensively documented findings made NOORDIN and his colleagues folk heroes and restored faith in the national banking system. 

NOORDIN is guided by deep moral convictions that began with his rural village family life and religious training. He believes that, depending upon their talents, all human beings have something to contribute to society, first by doing their own work well. He states that one becomes a sinner against society by giving in to pressure by influential figures, rather than protecting the rights of the powerless. “A career in public service,” he says, “should be viewed as more than earning a living. A public servant must recognize social injustice, and work towards reducing it with courage and determination.”

Modest in manner and lifestyle, NOORDIN has shown that a devoted civil servant, through his strength of character and excellence of performance, can restore confidence in government. In the process he has lent added impetus to Malaysia’s exceptionally rapid economic progress. 

In electing TAN SRI AHMAD NOORDIN BIN HAJI ZAKARIA to receive the 1985 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his effective, fearless exposure of inefficiency and corruption in government, making a reality of public accountability.

My wife and I are very happy and grateful to be here in Manila as guests of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. I am indeed delighted to be able to receive in person the 1985 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service at this colorful ceremony. 

I thank the Board of Trustees for having considered me worthy of receiving this high honor — an honor that I never dreamt of winning. Indeed, when a representative of a local newspaper in Kuala Lumpur told me the news around noon on August 1st, before I received the official telegram, I could not believe it. I thought I was being made a victim of a joke! This award is truly a godsend to me. 

It is also a great privilege for me to join the ranks of distinguished recipients, who have achieved distinction in various fields of human endeavor far greater than what I have been able to do in my own. They come from different academic and professional backgrounds, and their achievements have often been at great personal sacrifice. By comparison, I am just like a dwarf among giants, both in terms of physical build and personal accomplishments. I have been given this award for just doing the work for which I get paid. I did not think much about getting recognition. If the result of what I am doing in the line of duty has brought about an impact of some benefit to society, that in itself is already reward enough for me. This Award is even more significant to me and the audit profession, for I understand that this is the first time a member of the auditing fraternity has been so honored. 

The late President Ramon Magsaysay is remembered for his belief in the ideals of social justice, in the rights of individuals and in the importance of morality in government. He is remembered for his courageous efforts to realize these ideals. We want good government. We should learn from his wisdom how to put these ideals into practice. 

About 300 years ago the British poet, Alexander Pope, wrote rather cynically, “For form of government let fools contest, whatever is best administered is best.” Governments everywhere are still searching for the best methods to get the best out of public administration. We in Malaysia have chosen parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarchy as our form of government. It has worked quite well for the past 28 years. Today, August 31st, is the 28th Anniversary of our Independence, the starting point of that form of democracy. However, we are still trying to improve our methods of administration. 

The business of government becomes increasingly complex as it gets more directly involved in economic activities. We experience this phenomenon in my country. 

A responsible government knows that it must be accountable to the people for what it does or fails to do. There is, however, a tendency among governments to show this accountability more by appearances than by reality. For example, it is the fashion nowadays for governments to publicize far and wide what they plan to do for the good of the people with tax money and borrowings; but they tend to be less informative about their blunders and failures. Chances are that the civil servants get the blame, not because of hastily conceived plans, but for doing the wrong things. 

The rapid growth of public expenditure in my country during the last decade — from about M$7 billion in 1975 to an estimated M$29 billion in 1985 — has placed a heavy strain on the administrative and management capacity of the public service. It has brought in its wake problems of accountability. Until the impact of economic recession was seriously felt in 1982, the emphasis was to achieve the maximum financial targets in development spending. Control became lax, and as a result the standards of accountability suffered. When I joined the Audit Department in 1976, I thought that the accounting and auditing systems were very much in need of reform. 

Auditing in its wider sense means to review and evaluate results of financial activities in order to ascertain value for money spent. It is not just to express an opinion on the correctness of the accounts. Public accountability should cover the whole spectrum of financial management. I believe that with trained and experienced officers, the Audit Department could play a more useful role in public administration. True, we still have to look for errors and omissions. But this is not an end in itself. What is more important for auditors is to identify weaknesses in the system, analyze their causes, and suggest that administrators and managers take remedial measures as quickly as possible. We should try to make people aware of the need to be careful with public money. It is everybody’s money. It should be spent for a purpose which serves the greatest good for the greatest number. The people have a right to know how their money is used. They must have confidence in the Audit Department in carrying out its functions objectively. The press also has a role to play in promoting public accountability. It should be fair in reporting matters published in the Audit Reports and avoid sensitive issues that may cause misunderstanding and tension. 

If there has been any impact from what I have done to make the Audit Department play a more positive role in public administration, I alone cannot claim credit. The right to find faults and failings in public administration is not exclusive to the Audit Department. Others like the consumer groups, the press and interested individuals who care about public spending have also contributed their efforts to make the ordinary people in Malaysia understand the meaning of accountability of government. Those are the people who make democracy work. 

I share the honor you have given me with the people of Malaysia.