Mugabe Awarded Chinese Peace Prize

HONG KONG – A Chinese group has awarded President Robert Mugabe what is called China’s equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize, with the chairman of the committee saying the Zimbabwean president was “injecting fresh energy” into the global quest for harmony, according to news reports on Thursday.

The Confucius Prize, first awarded in 2010, comes with an award of $80,000 and is awarded by a group out of Hong Kong. Russian President Vladimir Putin won the prize in 2011, and Cuban former strongman Fidel Castro in 2014.

A total of nine judges from a panel of 16 experts and scholars picked the 91-year-old to win. He beat out the other contenders, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, President Park Geun-Hye of South Korea and Bill Gates.

The Daily News in Zimbabwe said the committee was “seemingly forgetting the violence that erupted across Zimbabwe in 2008 when hundreds of people were killed as the ruling party, aided by the military, embarked on a violent election campaign to rescue Mugabe after he lost the first round of polling”.

Qiao Wei, a poet and the president of the judging committee of the peace prize, was quoted as defending the award in a news report on Thursday, saying “The 21st-century interpretation of Confucianism is ‘universal harmony in the world,’ ” “Mugabe is the founding leader of Zimbabwe and has been trying to stabilize the country’s political and economic order ever since the country was first founded. He brought benefit to the people of Zimbabwe.”

The ceremony is scheduled to be held in December, and organisers said the official Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing will be the venue if Mugabe agrees to attend.