Wangari Maathai, founder of the Kenyan NGO the Green Belt Movement will today be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2004. Since establishing her organisation in 1977, Maathai has been among the strongest oppositional voices in Kenya. With the transition to democracy two years ago, she was elected Deputy Minister of the Environment. (10-DEC-04)
Sadly, Maathai had to spend a significant part of her press conference yesterday denouncing the claims allocated to her after the news broke that she was to be this year’s Laureate that she was of the opinion that Aids had been developed in Western medical laboratories and that the spread of the disease in Africa was the result of a further experiment gone out of control, in other words, a continuation of the several centuries long tradition of western abuse and exploitation of Africa.
Access to land a matter of life and death
However, having established that she never said this and never held such opinions, attention could move on to her own work, in which she has initiated the planting of more than 30 million trees and thus reforested huge areas at risk of permanent dehydration and destruction. In fact, Maathai’s organisation has managed to reverse the devastating consequences of cutting down about 90 percent of all forests in Kenya, which is what has happened between 1950 and today. This mindless instant profit oriented business has driven millions fron their land in the rural areas, and mostly into poverty in the shanty-towns surrounding the country’s big cities. Hence, throughout the Third World, access to land for self-subsistence farming is a key issue to hundreds of millions of people. For their ability to support themselves and sustain their way of living, it must be considered a fundamental right of theirs not to be driven off their land or see it destructed by large scale commercial farming programmes or simple deforestation, simply for the sake of selling the timber.
New notion of peace
Every year, conflicts over this issue drive millions of people to become internally displaced or refugees. It causes starvation and triggers open, often violent conflict or outright war. There is, thus, a direct connection between land rights and peace. When a delegation of HRH representatives visited the Nobel Institute as part of the programme for this year’s annual meeting, the Secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Professor Geir Lundestad, ephasised that while 1961, the year the South African human rights defender Albert Luthuli was awarded the prize has gone into history as the year human rights issues were included in the Committee’s understanding of peace, 2004 will be remembered as the year in which environmental issues were also included.
