Given the clamor of national politics in the Philippines and the dominant presence of Manila in the nation’s consciousness, it is easy to lose sight of the country’s great size and diversity. But in the highlands across the Philippine archipelago live several dozen groups of indigenous peoples whose ways of life stand in contrast to those of the lowland and urban majority. Although theirs is not wholly a world apart, it is a world still on the margins of the country’s major political, economic, and cultural systems. As a young man, BENJAMIN ABADIANO discovered this world and became part of it. 

Born in 1963, ABADIANO was raised by his grandparents and educated at Xavier University in Mindanao. A mentor there introduced him to the country’s indigenous peoples. During a brief exposure among the Manobo in Bukidnon, he found himself drawn to the spartan simplicity of upland life. In 1988, at age twenty-five, he wandered into Paitan, Mindoro Oriental, where the Servants of the Holy Spirit missionary sisters worked among the Mangyan. ABADIANO volunteered to help and stayed on for nine years. 

The nuns asked ABADIANOto focus on the people’s basic needs. He proposed an education program to emphasize literacy as well as livelihood and leadership skills, and to uphold Mangyan values and traditions. This became the Tugdaan (Seedbed) Center for Human and Environmental Development. ABADIANO launched the Center with only twelve students and a small hut, which he shared with them night and day. Soliciting donations from friends in Manila and acting as principal and teacher all in one, he built his small school into a comprehensive learning center with classrooms and meeting halls, a library, science laboratory, preschool, and Mangyan cultural resource center. In time, it served hundreds of Mangyans of all ages who, at Tugdaan, were encouraged to speak their own language and to wear Mangyan clothing. ABADIANO learned all he could about them and compiled the first Tagalog-Mangyan dictionary. He recruited new teachers for the Center and raised funds by organizing a business to produce and sell calamansi juice and other local products. When he departed Mindoro in 1997 to enter the Jesuit novitiate, ABADIANO left behind a thriving institution. Today, it is training nearly two hundred students and more than half of its teachers are Mangyan. 

In 2001, the Assisi Development Foundation called upon ABADIANO to lead its efforts in Mindanao to assist hundreds of thousands of people, uprooted by war, to return home and reestablish normal lives. As executive coordinator for Tabang Mindanaw, he developed a rehabilitation program that integrated social welfare, governance, and livelihood measures with peace building. Working tirelessly to coordinate negotiations between local authorities and religious leaders, the military, armed insurgents, and the people themselves, Abadiano helped to set up fifty-four Sanctuaries of Peace across Mindanao. At the same time, he connected with Mindanao’s indigenous groups, or Lumad, and founded the ILAWAN Center for Peace and Sustainable Development. ILAWAN’s Pamulaan Training Center now provides a culture-based education program like that of Tugdaan. Through ILAWAN, which means “holder of light,” ABADIANO hopes to foster the kind of volunteerism that first led him to Mindoro and to the work that has brought much meaning to his life. 

Indeed, ABADIANO’s heart is in the highlands with the Mangyan, Lumad, and other indigenous peoples. The passion he brings to everything he does comes from the example of his grandparents and, he says, from “a feeling of gratitude and of being blessed.” And if you are blessed, Abadiano believes, “You have to share your best.” 

In electing BENJAMIN ABADIANO to receive the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his steadfast commitment to indigenous Filipinos and their hopes for peace and better lives consonant with their hallowed ways of life.

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

 Agkanggayan! Peace to one and all! 

I stand here before this esteemed gathering today grateful yet awed for this recognition you have given me. It is wholly undeserved as I am aware that there are others out there, hundreds of men and women who live lives of dedicated service to the indigenous peoples, who are more deserving than I am in receiving this award. In honor of their quiet and oftentimes, unrecognized work, I dedicate this award first and foremost. 

In giving me this award, the Foundation affirms its conviction that only a life dedicated to others is a life truly worth living. I see myself, therefore, not so much as a model that can inspire others to a life of service, but as a channel of that one eternal message that brings life and hope to people — which says: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 

My life and work these past fifteen years serve as testimony of my great love for the Mangyan people of Mindoro, the Lumads and the Muslims of Mindanao. Greater still, I am here before you today as a witness to the kind of love I have received from them, our indigenous peoples and Muslim brothers and sisters. 

It is their love that has spurned me on to dream the dreams they have nurtured through generations — of a better life for themselves and their children. It is their love that continues to make me courageous in the face of the myriad of challenges I encounter in bringing education, peace, and development to the indigenous peoples and Muslim communities. 

I want to thank all the indigenous peoples and Muslims I have lived and worked with, especially you who are connected with the TUGDAAN Center for Human and Environmental Development, ILAWAN Center for Peace and Sustainable Development, and the Assisi Development Foundation. In loving me, I have learned a love that serves. In leading me to discover my life’s mission, I have learned the essential lessons in leadership. From you I have learned that to lead people is to share in their lives and to hold their deepest aspirations as my own. 

I receive this award in recognition also of the Mangyan leaders who shared with me their vision and dreams for their communities and children. Fifteen years ago they dreamed of having a program that would equip their communities to face the on-going changes in their lives while also promoting and enriching their culture as a people. Thus was created Tugdaan as a center that would respond to the Mangyan’s clamor for an educational program that was relevant to their realities, culture and aspirations. To the Akingans who are here with us this afternoon and to all other Mangyan Alangan leaders, thank you from the bottom of my heart. This too is your award, for without the kind of leadership you have shown me, I could not have learned what it means to lead. 

With this award, I recognize, too, the people who have been my mentors in learning about loving service and leadership. I would like to thank Sr. Victricia Pascassio, for her trust and confidence in my early years of mission work. I also want to thank the SSpS congregation and our partners and benefactors for their support in my work all these years. 

I want to thank in a very special way Ambassador Howard Dee and the rest of the Assisi Development Foundation family for providing me a home and a place where I could continue in sharing dreams with others. 

My deepest gratitude, also, to the men of the Society of Jesus, for the formation that has taught me the value of service, of being a man for others. 

I want to thank my grandparents who have gone ahead of us. Their love and care throughout the years of my childhood has become the foundation of my life values. 

And to my dearest of friends, you who have shared love, laughter, and tears with me as I journey through my life’s mission — thank you. You know who you are and what you mean to me. Thank you. Thank you. 

I thank also the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for entrusting me with all that this award stands for. I pray that my life and work in the years to come may deserve the weight of this honor that you have so generously bestowed on me. 

And finally, to the Almighty, I say thank you with all that I am. May it take me a lifetime and forever to express my gratitude. 

Buwaywa! Sukran! Thank you and peace be with you.

In the late twentieth century, “economic development” was the world’s watchword. Finding a formula to move millions of rural workers and farmers from poverty to prosperity preoccupied newly independent nations everywhere and also the countries that sought to aid and influence them. But no magic formula was found. It seems that some aspects of rural poverty are disturbingly resistant to the insights of development experts with PhD’s. Yet, in a remote corner of southern Thailand, a farmer with a fourth-grade education has made a breakthrough. This is PRAYONG RONNARONG. 

As a boy, PRAYONG RONNARONG observed his grandfather, a revered local healer. From him, and from his parents too, PRAYONG learned the value of serving others and the respect it confers. Theirs was a world of farmers, and PRAYONG spent only a few years in school before becoming a farmer himself. Like others in Mairiang Subdistrict, he invested in rubber, a promising cash crop in the early 1960s. And, like the others, he suffered badly when rubber prices plummeted a few years later. Responding to this blow, PRAYONG became a leader. 

Instead of abandoning rubber, PRAYONG led a group of farmers to study the crisis and to react rationally. Raising capital from fellow villagers at fifty baht per share, they built a rubber-processing plant in Mairiang to produce high-quality latex for the better prices of the Bangkok market. PRAYONG was soon managing a factory that produced three tons of latex a day. He became adept at drawing lessons from other rubber producers and applying them in Mairiang. Neighboring communities began to notice Mairiang’s success and, in the early 1990s, PRAYONG helped ten of them to establish similar community-owned latex factories. By 1996, there were over one hundred in his home province. Using the community-learning process they had adopted earlier, these farmers painstakingly developed their own Thai Para Rubber Strategic Plan. And despite government rejection of the plan, they continued to base their community activities on it. 

Meanwhile, PRAYONG created a council of leaders to plan Mairiang’s future collectively. At the Mairiang Community Learning and Development Center, he and the other leaders orchestrated cooperation between the subdistrict’s rice, fruit, and rubber growers and identified other products for which Mairiang’s farmers might gain a competitive advantage: rice-flour noodles, shampoo, drinking water, and others. They scoured the country to learn the best practices of other farmers and to gather the advice of experts. In the process, they created a “master plan” for Mairiang that promoted not only community enterprises but also education, health, and welfare measures funded from the profits of these enterprises-including scholarships for the youth and a social security fund. Today some nine hundred families are its direct beneficiaries. 

The number of its indirect beneficiaries is much higher. In recent years, key elements of PRAYONG’s community-crafted master-plan approach have been adopted as part of Thailand’s economic and social development programs. They are now being applied across the country, and PRAYONG is frequently on call to explain how it is done. 

The key, he says, is to identify “a small group of like-minded people who are willing to do something” and then to support them in every way possible. Indeed, this has been PRAYONG’s role and today, at sixty-three, he continues to embrace it. Despite a certain celebrity and even trips around the world, he remains true to his roots in Mairiang, avoiding fancy hotels and other luxuries such as an automobile. “It’s not money that makes me happy but to do something I really want to do,” he says. “Developing the people comes naturally.” 

In electing PRAYONG RONNARONG to receive the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his leading fellow farmers in demonstrating that the model of self-reliant local enterprises, supported by active community learning, is the path to rural prosperity in Thailand.

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

It is a great honor for me, an ordinary farmer from a small community in Southern Thailand, to be named Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Community Leadership. I would like to thank you on behalf of my community members, my fellow farmers, for your recognition of what we have been doing and struggling for during the past decades to improve the quality of life of the poor and disadvantaged people in the rural areas. 

I was fortunate to be born in a Southern community, where people love learning. I inherited this spirit from my family and community. Although I finished only the 4th grade, I have been learning my whole life in what I call a “Life University.” I have been learning by doing, by interacting with other people from all walks of life. 

My environment was and still is, as most of Southern Thailand, dominantly rubber plantation. In 1969 rubber prices dropped drastically. It was the year we started to seriously search for solutions from rubber problems, which were linked to all other problems. From our small community in Mairiang, the network of people expanded to other provinces of the South, and from that day to today, 35 years of lessons learned have crystallized into a development paradigm, including a way of thinking, of acting, of valuing based on a particular view of reality, which I would like to put into four simple words: 

1. Learning. One of the most important principles I have been using during the past decade is “know yourself, know your community, know the world which has an impact on community life”. Know yourself means to be aware of what one is doing and where one is going, and why. For the community, there is a need for a learning process for all community members, so that all may be aware of themselves, of the changes happening in the society and in the world. 

2. Self-reliance. During the first period (about 30 years ago) our community struggled by itself, practically without any assistance from outside, to solve rubber problems. We got together and shared our concerns, and we realized that by so doing it was not sufficient to find solutions. We decided to go out to learn from other people and other places, and from the larger world. Three years later, we succeeded in drawing lessons learned and decided to set up a community rubber processing factory, managed, and owned by the community. That enterprise gave us confidence. We can now face any problem on our own. 

3. Freedom. Past experiences taught us that we have to rely on ourselves, make our own decisions, and use our own resources, without depending totally on others’ initiatives and resources. We learn that success is the result of our free decision, being ourselves in learning, in choosing our way of life and development. 

4. Social relationship. We realize that we need to establish relationships and collaboration with all parties. Mairiang has established relationships with other communities in the form of a network. At the local level, we have a network of rubber, fruit and rice growers. We also collaborate with the Village Foundation to develop models of community rubber factories, community health scheme, and community enterprise, and a strategic plan. All these have been well received by the government and adopted into the national policy. We have established the Mairiang Community Learning and Development Centre. Gos, NGOs, academics and people from the private sector from outside the community come to complement what we have initiated and invested with our resources. We make the main “contribution,” they provide the “counterpart.”

I am aware that this Ramon Magsaysay Award is not directed to me personally, but as a member of a community, a community leader in Thailand. I am only one small part of the network of communities which expand day by day. This precious award is the price of our common efforts and accomplishments. I will deliver this means of hope and encouragement back to all the members of Mairiang and the communities in my country, Thailand.

The Bengali literary tradition is among the richest in Asia, drawing upon a deep well of its own and upon centuries of cosmopolitan interaction with the rest of the world. ABDULLAH ABU SAYEED cherishes this tradition and is part of it. But modern history and its upheavals have left many people in Bangladesh without access to literature or to books of any kind. Today, television and other media have largely displaced books as the primary source of knowledge and pleasure. Reading has gone out of fashion. Sayeed despairs for this trend. Through his Bishwo Shahitto Kendro, or World Literature Center, he is acting to reverse it. 

Born in Kolkata (Calcutta) in 1939, Sayeed was the son of a well-known playwright. After Partition, he attended Dhaka University in East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in 1971. As a young man, SAYEED wrote poetry and prose and led a vibrant literary movement in the 1960s as editor of the magazine Kanthashar (The Voice). He drifted into the new medium of television and hosted a succession of popular shows. For some thirty years, he taught literature at Dhaka College. 

Observing the decline of intellectual life in Bangladeshi society, SAYEED founded the World Literature Center in 1978 to restore interest in reading among the youth and to “enlighten human beings.” Under his guidance, twenty-five university students began reading and discussing great works of literature in an Enrichment Program that eventually grew to include high school students and general readers. Meeting in guided “reading circles” and drawing on literary and nonliterary works from the Bengali and world canons, each group in SAYEED’s program worked its way through a twenty-two-week reading course each year, completing more than one hundred books over seven years. 

Assisted by the Ministry of Education, SAYEED extended his Enrichment Program to branches in Dhaka and eventually throughout Bangladesh. Today, there are five hundred branches in fifty-four districts and the program has hundreds of thousands of graduates. In the meantime, SAYEED has developed the center itself as a library, serving hundreds of readers daily, and also as a publishing house. Yearly sales of its two hundred and fifty volumes provide financial support for the center’s many activities. 

Responding to the lack of public-lending libraries in Bangladesh, SAYEED launched a nationwide library program in 1998. Funded largely by the Norwegian government, its mobile libraries-actually, buses stocked with thousands of books-today make stops at two hundred and fifty locations in four cities throughout the country. Nearly twenty thousand readers have become members of the program. 

Versatile and charismatic, SAYEED has written twenty-two books. He devotes himself fully to the center and its programs and, these days, also to urgent environmental concerns. His work is constantly growing. Today, the center offers programs in the arts and possesses a film and music library. SAYEED manages it all with seventy-six staff members and more than four thousand volunteers, including many of his former students. He dreams of building an ever larger network of libraries, bookmobiles, and reading circles throughout Bangladesh; of publishing seven hundred and fifty of the world’s great books in Bangla translation; and of erecting a new twelve-story cultural complex in Dhaka. But, most of all, Sayeed dreams of a new generation of enlightened Bangladeshi citizens whose values and understanding of other cultures are enriched by reading. His country’s future leaders will emerge from such a group, he says hopefully. “We see our students everywhere.” 

In electing ABDULLAH ABU SAYEED to receive the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his cultivating in the youth of Bangladesh a love for books and their humanizing values through exposure to the great works of Bengal and the world.

I come from a country that is very new as a sovereign state. We have passed many years under foreign domination. Foreigners have occupied our land and played with our destiny. We did not have any scope to decide our own fate. This opportunity came to us only with our independence in 1971. 

Our nation achieved freedom through a war. But the war of liberation was against an external enemy. Our real war however began after that, in the free world of our independence, against not an external force but against ourselves. This was an all-out war, long drawn and sleepless. It was against the decadence and degeneration, indolence and inefficiency within us. Our enemy this time was our pettiness, greed, inadequacy, and capacity for self-destruction. The realization grew that the Bangladesh we had achieved was not the mythical Golden Bengal, but a Bengal of just plain earth. It was for us to transform it into Golden Bengal with our labor, endeavor, and dedication. Our main struggle therefore was to build a strong and prosperous motherland. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we soon left behind the restless phase and our national life began to stabilize. We began moving forward with some confidence. Trade and industry started to grow, and there began an initial capital accumulation. We achieved credible success in various sectors such as education, communication, population, agriculture, etc. There was global recognition for several positive NGO initiatives in Bangladesh, and the civil society movement gradually gained in strength. 

This is the context of the establishment of the Bishwo Shahitto Kendro in Bangladesh in 1978. We had realized then that we were entering a phase of nation building. Nation builders therefore were the need of the hour-enriched men and women inspired by ideals, dreams, and human values. These men and women would build the nation with their vision, their labor, and their excellence. Bangladesh?s future depends on developing these men and women, and in large numbers. 

Little minds and great nations cannot go together. Consequently, our aspiration for greatness as a nation must be matched by our commitment to create enlightened people within the nation. And, therefore, our endeavor is to create for Bangladesh an informed, enriched, and committed generation of future citizens. In this, our focus has been on the youth. We, the older generation, represent the past, while the youth are the future. They are young, impressionable, inquisitive, and receptive. At Bishwo Shahitto Kendro, we are preparing them with qualities of human leadership through the study of books and by engaging them in various cultural activities to promote a spirit of cross-cultural understanding, refined sensibility, and action. They are inspired to pursue great dreams early in life. 

Ours is a small country in terms of area, but our population is large. There is a pressing need for humanistic development in the nation as a whole. Therefore, parallel to our effort for enrichment, we have also endeavored to take books and other cultural opportunities to the doorstep of the citizens at large. 

Ladies and gentlemen, the awakening of human values is relevant not only for our nation alone, but also in the context of today’s world. Materialism has converted everything in this world into consumables. Man today is continuously becoming dehumanized. Mechanization is becoming the inexorable fate of humankind. We may have to witness the painful end of human civilization unless we are able to inculcate in our future generations the finer human values in the face of this overpowering trend of consumerism. This is what we have been trying to do in the limited context of our country. 

Distinguished guests, the promise of a prize or an award does not engender action. Initiatives are born in response to the sufferings that we are dogged by constantly. Nevertheless, prizes and awards are a source of great pleasure and satisfaction. These provide not only joy, inspiration, and strength, but also enhance our responsibility. The overpowering darkness and ignorance in our national life prompted me to act. That is all I can say. 

The Ramon Magsaysay Award has enhanced my sense of responsibility. And I accept this honor in all humility. I thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

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 members of the fourth estate, friends all over the world, especially in India and Pakistan and here in the Philippines. 

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation has done me a great honour by conferring this award on me for Peace and International Understanding this year. 

I am very happy to share this award with my friend I.A. Rehman from Pakistan for it puts people of our two countries before anything else in the best traditions of peace and democracy. I am also grateful to the Foundation for recognizing the work that I have been doing in the larger global context on issues concerning nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament. I must be the first one to acknowledge here in public that but for my wife, Lalita’s contribution and support much of all this would not have been possible. Coming from a minority of one in a family of four women I had very little choice but to be democratic and listen! 

We have seen for far too long the Jammu and Kashmir issue, as an argument about which government will assert sovereignty. But if governments are to be in the service of people, if armed forces are to be in the service of peace, then the rights of the people must come first. Millions of families are divided across the border that was created by making freedom in South Asia among the more bloody chapters in the history of struggle against colonialism. The tragedy and the tears cannot be undone, but it is a moral imperative that people be allowed to move across borders without fear, so that they can pursue normal lives?celebrate births and weddings and mourn the deaths of dear ones in dignity and peace. 

We have over the past ten years tried in our own small way to make the people in both our countries aware of the enormous challenges and opportunities that face us. Peace is what the people want for they are very clear what the peace dividend has in store for them and their children. The Treaty of Westphalia 1648, which created the concept of the Nation State, has in its wake sharpened the prejudices which were built in at the time of partition of the country. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by both India and Pakistan has further endangered the security environment of the region. We can alter history, alter people’s minds, sow seeds of hatred but cannot erase the oneness of humanity. Humanity above Nationality should dominate modern thinking for this cuts across borders, race, color, caste, creed and gender. The role of the military must also not remain static. It must trim its sails in keeping with the times. Your President Mme. Arroyo’s own courageous decision to pull back your troops from Iraq has been acclaimed the world over. Whilst this might have made her unpopular with a few it has gained her many friends and admirers including myself. 

This beautiful planet of ours is but a mere speck in this universe. In the ancient Indian scripture, Vedas, we have a saying, “Vasudeva Kuttumbakkam” which means, “The world is one family” — We need to keep it that way. 

I wish to conclude by once again thanking the government, the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and the beautiful people of Philippines for their warmth and hospitality that they have shown us during our stay here. Salamat and Namaste.

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.

Democracy has deep roots in the Philippines, yet its authority continues to be tested. Years of dictatorship, graft in high places, and the corruption of the electoral process by “goons, guns, and gold” have left many Filipinos cynical not only about democracy but about government itself-all the more so because government seems repeatedly to fall short of its promises and goals. In such a climate, serving in government can be thankless. Yet, HAYDEE YORAC, a lawyer and professor of law, has repeatedly answered the call to serve. In doing so, she has confounded the cynics and shown that even the most intractable problems can yield to solutions if they are attacked honestly and with vigor. 

HAYDEE YORAC hails from a small Visayan town where her father was mayor and her mother taught school. She moved on to the University of the Philippines and its College of Law and passed the bar in 1963. As a young law instructor at her alma mater, she became politically active and opposed the Vietnam War. When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, she was jailed for over three months and, afterwards, moved to the forefront of the legal fight to restore democracy. People came to know her as outspoken, incorruptible, and fearless. 

After the People Power Revolution, YORAC served seven years as a national election commissioner, organizing elections in contested, far-flung areas of the country and lending her considerable reputation to the hopeful project of restoring integrity to the country’s electoral process. As chair of the National Unification Commission in 1992 and 1993, she met face-to-face with the government?s armed opponents and astutely identified grounds for negotiation and peace; her commission’s insightful report became a trusted blueprint for the country’s peace process. YORAC then shifted to private practice until, in 2001, she was named chair of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, or PCGG. 

In 1986, President Corazon Aquino created the PCGG in her very first executive order. Its mandate was to restore to the Philippines vast amounts of wealth stolen by Marcos and his family and friends. This was a difficult task. The commission launched case after case and the years passed. By the time YORAC was named its eleventh chair, it had recovered only two billion out of an estimated ten billion U.S. dollars of the Marcos hoard. Many people said that the PCGG was on a fool’s errand. YORAC proved them wrong. 

Advancing on all fronts, she strengthened the commission’s staff with talented young lawyers. She cultivated good working relations with the commission’s collaborating agencies. She brought order to its chaotic files, computerizing them for the first time. And she stoked the fires under hundreds of stalled cases and long-running legal battles. 

Stunning victories followed. On her watch, the PCGG recovered for the national treasury U.S.$683 million from Marcos’s Swiss bank accounts. It also secured court decisions favorable to the government regarding shares worth billions of pesos in the United Coconut Planters Bank and San Miguel Corporation. These are the commission’s largest gains since its establishment, a boon both for the Philippine agrarian reform program and, not incidentally, for the country’s faith in justice. 

Even so, many hundreds of PCGG cases remain unresolved. YORAC continues to move them through the courts impatiently. Slowed by recent illnesses, the feisty, sixty-three-year-old Yorac has had to work from her sickbed. She knows she will not complete the task herself. Others will rise to it. “No one is indispensable,” she reminds us all. “Making a difference is enough.”

In electing HAYDEE YORAC to receive the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes her building confidence in government through service of exceptional integrity and rigor and her unwavering pursuit of the rule of law in the Philippines.

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

I would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and those who have taken part in the selection process for bestowing this honor upon me. I feel humbled by this recognition because I know I did not do it alone. There are so many other unsung public servants who have made their respective contributions in making the public office truly a public trust. 

Our values and personal convictions dictate the direction that we take and the stand that we make on moral issues that affect our work, in particular, and the country, in general. The desire to make government more effective and efficient in its mandate of good governance is of paramount importance. It is the driving force that compels many of us to accept responsibilities in government, despite the odds. 

In the Philippines, the odds are made even more formidable by our experience of a dictatorship that ravaged our economy and shattered the morale of our people. Twenty years takes a long time to undo and, sometimes, it can really be frustrating! However, I have been favored with the support of well-meaning individuals and groups in this endeavor. Together we have tried to do our best in regaining the public’s trust in government. 

The task is by no means completed; the goal is not yet reached. We continue to try and do our best and leave the rest in God’s hands. Thank you and good evening.

A small dose of truth can sometimes make all the difference, especially in societies where speaking out is not the norm. In China, for example, stability is highly prized and, with it, restraint. It is rare for someone to contradict the authorities openly. For most of his life, JIANG YANYONG, a medical doctor, felt little need to do so. But in 2003, as the virus called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome swept unacknowledged into Beijing, he broke China’s habit of silence and forced the truth of SARS into the open.

Born to privilege but in unsettled times, JIANG attended Yanjing University during the final years of the civil war that, in 1949, brought communist rule to China. He chose a career in medicine after seeing an aunt die of tuberculosis and, in 1952, entered Peking Union Medical College. Embracing the hopes of the revolution, JIANG joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1954 and, in 1957, was assigned to the army’s No. 301 Hospital in Beijing. In 1987, he was named its chief surgeon.

Indeed, JIANG became a master surgeon, earning the nickname Magic Scalpel and also Brave Jiang, for daring to take the most difficult cases. Serving with the army Railway Corps in the 1960s, his skill in trauma surgery saved the lives of many soldiers injured while building the the Chengdu-Kunming railroad line. Like other professionals of his generation, he rode the waves of China’s political storms, suffering as a “rightist” following the Hundred Flowers campaign of the 1950s and as a “counterrevolutionary” during the bitter Cultural Revolution. In each case, JIANG was vindicated and his good name restored. As a loyal member of the Chinese Communist Party, he kept faith with his country’s leadership and its willingness to recognize and correct its mistakes.

General JIANG was already retired in early 2003 when SARS began to spread from its original habitat in Guangdong Province to Hong Kong and beyond. Through contacts in Beijing’s hospitals, he learned of the alarming number of SARS cases and deaths in the capital. Yet, as the threat of an epidemic mounted, Beijing’s hospital officials were warned not to speak about it for fear of disturbing important national meetings. In April, China’s health minister announced SARS figures that grossly understated the facts. JIANG now acted. In a letter to the press, he revealed the true figures and, at great risk, signed his name. Other Chinese doctors and the World Health Organization corroborated his revelations and the news spread around the world. JIANG’s jolt of truth struck home. The Chinese authorities acted quickly. They fired the country’s health minister and, in June, made SARS the subject of a massive public health campaign. A comprehensive system of monitoring was soon in place and, by July, the deadly virus was contained.

For his bold act, JIANG enjoyed a brief moment of celebrity and was lauded as “China’s pride.” But he is not a dissident by nature. He obeyed orders not to speak to reporters. And when the crisis passed, he openly applauded China’s leaders for their “marked progress in the fight against the epidemic.”

Seventy-two-year-old JIANG, a tall man with a kindly face, visits his old surgery wards weekly and still accepts the occasional case. His vocation has shaped his character. “I am a doctor,” he says. “If I see a human life at stake, I will intervene.”

In electing JIANG YANYONG to receive the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes his brave stand for truth in China, spurring life-saving measures to confront and contain the deadly threat of SARS.