Peace Scholar Picks Thich Quang Do As 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

San Francisco, CA – October 14, 2007 — “If I had to pick who will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, I’d go with Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Do,” declares Scott A. Hunt, peace scholar and author of the award-winning book The Future of Peace: On the Front Lines with the World’s Great Peacemakers. “He’s the real deal — a courageous, steadfast, peacemaker who, against seemingly insurmountable odds, has spent decades advocating for peace, justice, and religious freedom.

He’s been imprisoned, interrogated, threatened, denounced, banished, and placed under house arrest, and still he has continued his struggle. ”
Thich Quang Do received the 2006 Rafto Prize, but he remains largely unknown outside of human rights circles. “I think this is the year for Thich Quang Do, given his accomplishments, his age, the situation in Burma, and the need of the Nobel Committee to keep the award from turning into a big-name-only prize.”

“Admittedly, it is notoriously difficult to guess who will receive a Nobel Peace Prize,” Hunt notes. “In part, that is because the Nobel Committee has in recent times loosely defined what activities qualify as peacemaking. In part it is because they often like to overlook highly visible figures and pluck candidates from obscurity in order to draw attention to their worthy causes.”

Scott A Hunt is one of the few writers in the world to have interviewed many of the Nobel Peace Prize recipients in their home countries, including the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, John Hume, President Oscar Arias, Betty Williams, and Mairead Corrigan Maguire. He has also interviewed many perennial nominees, including Maha Ghosananda, Thich Quang Do, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Jane Goodall, and he used to correspond with Mother Teresa. Hunt, a graduate of Harvard, spent years traveling to war zones to try to draw lessons from seemingly intractable conflicts. He appears widely as a guest on radio programs and lectures at universities and forums on peacemaking. Hunt has twice been quoted in the New York Times.

“The bets are overwhelmingly in favor of Gore winning this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. I applaud Gore’s work, but he is rich, he is powerful, and he has saturated the media with his message, especially after the Oscar-winning documentary about him and the Emmy that he won. Simply put, he doesn’t need the prize at all. At some point, doesn’t it just become a vanity award for him?”

“Of course, I think his chances increase if he is selected as a co-recipient with the little-known Canadian activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier.”

“A more deserving choice is Vietnamese dissident Thich Quang Do. If the prize means what it used to mean, Thich Quang Do will win.” The Communist state press has attacked the 79-year-old monk as a “renegade” who has “abused people’s sympathy” in an attempt “to cause social disorder.” Thich Quang Do responds with laughter and kindness.

Thich Quang Do recently called on the UN to take emergency action in Burma noting, "For almost 200 years, the people of Burma and Vietnam shared the same fate under colonial rule, with repression of our faith and the dismantling of our clergy. Over the past decades, we have both suffered oppression under military or totalitarian dictatorships. We come together in a common aspiration for the right to life and freedom."

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