Nobel laureate dedicates prize to protest victims

THE WIFE of Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo is under house arrest after she had a brief and emotional meeting with her husband, during which he dedicated his prize to the “lost souls” of the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in June 1989.

Liu Xia said on Twitter that she had been unable to make phone calls and she told the rights group Human Rights in China that she was followed after she came back from visiting Mr Liu in Jinzhou, in Liaoning province, where he is serving 11 years in jail for subversion.

“This award is for the lost souls of June 4th,” Mr Liu told his wife during their visit, saying that he had won the award because of the non-violent spirit of the protesters, who gave their lives for peace, freedom and democracy.

He broke down in tears after delivering his message, she said.

Mr Liu was jailed on Christmas Day last year for co-authoring Charter 08, a manifesto for political reform.

Ms Xia said that her communications had been cut and that both her and her brother’s mobile phones had been interfered with.

Uniformed guards at Ms Liu’s apartment building have stopped diplomats from entering the complex, and Human Rights in China said she had been told she would have to be accompanied by police if she wanted to leave the building.

China is furious at the Nobel panel’s decision, saying Mr Liu is a “criminal” and calling the award a travesty that flies in the face of the spirit of the Nobel.

The country’s censors have gone into overdrive to stop news of the award and comment spreading. Messages on social networks are disappearing as quickly as they are posted, even though many of them are already banned in China, and searches on the issue are blocked on most search engines by the Great Firewall of China.

Repercussions from the prize continue to grow.

Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama also weighed in with criticism of China’s outraged reaction, saying the Chinese government did “not appreciate different opinions at all”.

The Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1989, told the Kyodo news agency in Tokyo that building an open, transparent society was “the only way to save all people of China” but that some “hardliners” in the Beijing leadership were stuck in “old way of thinking”.

Norway said Beijing had called off a meeting with the Norwegian fisheries minister, after the Chinese government had previously warned that giving the award to the 54-year-old literary critic would harm relations between the countries, even though the Nobel committee is an independent non-governmental body.

Norwegian minister of fisheries and coastal affairs, Lisbeth Berg-Hansen, arrived in China on Monday for a week-long visit to the World Expo in Shanghai, and was supposed to meet China’s deputy minister for fisheries on Wednesday but the Chinese cancelled the meeting.

Mr Liu is one of three people to have been awarded the prize while being jailed by their own governments.

The other two are Burma’s Aung Sang Suu Kyi in 1991 and German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935.

Leaders around the world including US president Barack Obama – last year’s Nobel peace prize winner – have praised Mr Liu and called on the Chinese government to release him immediately.

Four United Nations human rights experts have also called for Mr Liu’s release, saying he is a “courageous human rights defender who has continuously and peacefully advocated for greater respect for human rights” in China.