A Fitting Nobel for Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi
Malala Yousafzai, who is seventeen years old, and Kailash Satyarthi, who is sixty, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday morning—for, in the committee’s words, “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”
Satyarthi, who is Indian, is a man who has fought for children for decades; Malala, who is Pakistani, is a child, and a fighter herself. There was some thought, ahead of the announcement, that Malala, as she is known, would be awarded the prize alone. She is more famous than Satyarthi. Two years ago, gunmen from the Taliban got on her school bus and shot her in the head, shattering her skull—an attack she answered by becoming one of the world’s clearest voices for girls’ education. Satyarthi has survived physical attacks, too, and has led raids on factories that hold small children as bonded laborers. His group, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, has set up schools where those children can be set on a different path. According to press reports, he has worked directly with more than eighty thousand children, and has fought to change the conditions and chances of hundreds of thousands more. Satyarthi has also addressed the role of Western consumers who buy rugs woven with small fingers, helping to set up a labelling system, called Goodweave. Both of these people deserved the award individually. The combination of the two laureates gives it a nuanced character—and a different kind of power than if it had gone to either of them alone.
It is past time to stop seeing Malala as simply the girl who survived, as a symbol. (The Times called her a “global emblem.”) She is a girl who leads: who addressed the United Nations on her sixteenth birthday; who amazes Jon Stewart and asks Barack Obama about drones. (Watch her U.N. speech for a view of her matchlessly inspiring presence, and also for her words against violence.) She was so young when the Taliban set out to assassinate her. The gunmen targeted her—they shouted her name—because she had written on a blog for the BBC about how girls should go to school. They shot and injured the girl she was sitting with, too. In the days that followed, hundreds of people lined up outside the hospital where doctors were trying to save her, offering to donate blood. She would eventually be brought to a Pakistani military hospital and then airlifted to Birmingham, England, for specialized surgery. Looking at what Malala has accomplished since the day she got on that bus, one can imagine, someday, people lining up outside a polling station, to vote for her.
The threats against Malala have not ended; they simply haven’t silenced her. She is not only a witness whose story warms our hearts. She is an activist, and soon will be an adult, who will, one hopes, also make some of her casual admirers uncomfortable by asking for more than wonder at her bravery. She is a compelling speaker and an adept organizer. The worst insult to Malala would be to regard her as nothing more than a child performer for peace, kept in a moment we want to keep hearing about.
Satyarthi is not Malala’s babysitter: he is her counterpart. The committee said, in its announcement, that it “regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.” If the committee had bypassed Malala, as it did last year, one suspicion would have been that it was afraid of positioning the Nobel as a rebuke to the Islamic world alone. Perhaps some element of that was at work, but if so, the solution is a valuable one. Here, again, complexity adds strength to the committee’s message. The struggle for the rights of children is not just a matter of feeling sorry for the people of this country or that; it is a common interrogation. There is plenty of complicity—and we are not exempt. Satyarthi also has an economic mission that challenges the West. What does it mean to set up a factory in a country where children don’t go to school, or to buy clothes without looking at the labels? For that matter, in the United States, what does it mean when children are pulled into the criminal-justice system and not treated as children at all? Whose children are all children?
The Peace Prize has often been broadly understood; children’s rights fits well into its mandate of increasing understanding between nations. It’s not only an abstract matter, though. War takes children out of school, whether they are refugees, as in Syria, or targets of attack, like the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. Children who have no other options are also likelier recruits for war. The economic exploitation of children is also raw abuse, backed up by coercion and often violence. (Satyarthi, in a speech, described a factory where “if they tried to run away, they were hanged upside down on trees and beaten with stones…. Many of them had been burned with cigarettes.”) School is a rebuke to war; so is caring about the futures of other people’s children.
One point that the Nobel committee, in its citation, somewhat underplays is the question of gender. The announcement mentions Malala’s particular commitment to girls’ education, but the framework is children as children. Whatever its words, though, this should be a prize that is also about gender, because the exploitation of children is tied up in gender issues, too. Satyarthi’s work has also included campaigns against child marriage.
The Nobel committee has given an award to a seventeen-year-old, the youngest Peace Prize laureate ever. In one way, that is an act of faith about what and who Malala Yousafzai will become—not only about who she has been. (In her case, it might be less of a gamble than giving the prize to a President who has just been elected.) Any award for children—to children—is a bet on a future that one can’t quite predict, but which might be better. That’s just as it should be.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/malala-yousafzai-nobel-prize
