Oslo, Dec. 10: Clapping solemnly, dignitaries in Norway celebrated this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, with an empty chair. Friday’s ceremony was the first time in 74 years the prestigious $1.4 million award was not handed over, because Liu is serving an 11-year sentence in China. The Prize was dedicated from his prison cell to the “lost souls” of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
India’s ambassador to Norway was among the 1,000 guests attending the ceremony, defying China’s objections.
China did not allow Liu’s wife to travel to Oslo to accept the award. In Beijing, both CNN and BBC TV went black at 8 pm local time when the Oslo ceremony was taking place.
“We can to a certain degree say that China with its 1.3 billion people is carrying man-kind’s fate on its shoulders,” Norwegian Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said at the ceremony in Oslo’s grey-walled City Hall.
The last time a Nobel Peace Prize was not handed out was in 1936, when Adolf Hitler prevented German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky from accepting his award.