Exploration 11

            The Noble Peace Prize speeches we read gave some insight to the ethical problems countries around were and are facing. My favorite passage is when Frederik de Klerk says, “We are political opponents. We disagree strongly on key issues and will soon fight a strenuous election campaign against one another. We will do so, I believe, in the frame of mind and within the framework of peace which has already been established.” The reason this is my favorite is he is showing unity between two politically opposite humans. This I feel is also important because of what it is he which made it so he got the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the one who decided to release Mandel from prison and set the foundation for a democracy in South Africa which since he is white and white people are a minority he was setting himself up to fail in the next election. When doing some research I found some very disturbing statistics from 1978 that have to do with South Africa. The statistics show that the white population was “4.5 million” and the black population was “19 million” yet the blacks only owned “13 percent” of the land. The numbers go on to compare the blacks’ “1:44,000” doctor to population ratio and the whites’ “1:400” ratio along with the blacks’ “1:60” and whites’ “1:22” teacher to population ratio (see link below).

            The 14^th Dalai Lama, according to the Noble Peace Prize website “is the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people.” In 1987 he made a “Five-Point Peace Plan” that was to help free Tibet from Chinese tyrants. According to the Dalai Lama website the five parts of his peace plan included: making Tibet into a peace zone, destruction of “China’s population transfer policy,” acknowledgement of Tibetan human rights and freedoms, stopping the production of nuclear weapons in Tibet, and negotiations for future policies that affect Tibet. I found that along with many other problems that Tibet is having some priceless Tibetan artifacts are being stolen (see Fig. 1) according to the CRS Report for Congress titled, “Tibet: Problems, Prospects, and U.S. Policy.” These artifacts are important to the Tibetan culture. Chinese suppressers have been linked to some of these sales and that shows the blatant disrespect some people in China have for the Tibetan people.

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.hist.html