Cambodian, Indian among winners of Magsaysay awards

MANILA: A Cambodian genocide survivor who helped document the Khmer Rouge atrocities and an Indian psychiatrist who led the rescue of thousands of mentally ill street paupers to treat and reunite them with their families are among the six winners of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Awards, regarded as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.

The other recipients named yesterday are a Filipino who led peace talks with communist insurgents, a polio-stricken Vietnamese who fought discrimination against the disabled, an East Timorese who built care centres for the poor amid civil strife and an Indian who tutored village students to help them pass exams.

The awards, named after a Philippine president who died in a 1957 plane crash, are to be presented in Manila on Aug 31.

“All are unafraid to take on large causes. All have refused to give up despite meagre resources, daunting adversity and strong opposition,” Carmencita Abella, president of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, said of the winners.

“Their approaches are all deeply anchored on a respect for human dignity and a faith in the power of collective endeavour.”

Youk Chhang lost his father, five of his siblings and nearly 60 of his relatives during the genocidal Khmer Rouge rule in the late 1970s and subsequent civil war, but he escaped and found his way to the United States as a refugee.

He returned home after order was restored and headed a centre that documented the horrific violence in aid of the Khmer Rouge war crimes trials.

The massive scope of his group’s work included collecting more than a million documents, producing digital maps of more than 23,000 mass graves and excavating remains for forensic examination.

Youk, 57, is currently involved in a project to develop a museum, archives, library and a graduate programme on crimes against humanity.

In India, where there are an estimated 400,000 street paupers with mental illness, psychiatrist Bharat Vatwani started a mission in 1988 that by now has rescued, treated and reintegrated into their families more than 7,000 of them.

Vatwani’s “healing compassion” affirmed “the human dignity of even the most ostracised in our midst”, the foundation said.

Filipino businessman Howard Dee turned to a range of civic work, including responding to widespread contingencies in the southern Philippines caused by drought, famine and insurgency-wrought violence. He served as a government negotiator in peace talks with communist rebels in the 1990s.

Contracting polio when she was two years old, Vo Thi Hoang Yen helped start a non-profit group in 2005, which has helped about 15,000 people with disabilities get jobs.

Maria de Lourdes Martins Cruz from East Timor led efforts to help the poor get access to healthcare, education, farming and livelihood in the midst of her country’s tumultuous transition to independence in 2001.

Born in Ladakh, a high-altitude region in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, Sonam Wangchuk fought discrimination against minorities at a young age to pursue an engineering course and founded a movement in 1988 that helped tutor poor village students so they could pass exams. — AP