Yorac among Magsaysay awardees

Peace advocate and Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) chairman Haydee Yorac is one of this year’s recipients of the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award.

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) announced yesterday the seven recipients of the award widely considered as Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Yorac will receive the award, which is given in six categories, for government service.

A former commissioner of the Commission of Elections (Comelec), Yorac was cited for "her building the people’s confidence in government through service of exceptional integrity and rigor and her unwavering pursuit of the rule of law in the Philippines."

During her term as head of the PCGG, the commission "successfully recovered" some $684 million in Swiss bank deposits linked to former President Ferdinand Marcos and won favorable court decisions on assets in United Coconut Planters Bank and San Miguel Corp.

Another Filipino, Benjamin Abadiano, was cited for his work to bring peace and progress to the country’s indigenous peoples.

Abadiano will receive the award for Emergent Leadership, given to leaders not over 40 and not "broadly recognized" outside their communities.

The other Magsaysay Awardees are Abdullah Abu Sayeed for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts (Bangladesh); Jiang Yanyong for Public Service (China); Prayong Ronnarong for Community Leadership (Thailand); and Laxminarayan Ramdas (India) and Ibn Abdur Rehman (Pakistan), who shared the award for Peace and International Understanding.

The awardees, who will join 236 previous recipients of the award, will each receive a cash prize, a certificate and a medallion bearing the likeness of the late President Ramon Magsaysay.

The award will be conferred in ceremonies at the Cultural Center of the Philippines on Aug. 31.

The awardees have also been invited to speak in a series of public lectures at the Ramon Magsaysay Center from Aug. 26 to Sept. 1.

The Magsaysay Award was established in 1957 by the trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to honor Magsaysay’s "sense of selfless service."

Unlike the Nobel Prize, the Magsaysay Award is more of a leadership award than an award for excellence in a purely technical field like physics and literature.

A poet in his own right and leader of a vibrant literary movement in Bangladesh in the 1960s, Abdullah Abu Sayeed was cited for his efforts to bring reading and literature back to a society inundated by television and the other mass media.

Sayeed founded the World Literature Center in 1978 to encourage young people to read and in 1998 launched a nationwide "bookmobile" program. The mobile libraries make stops at 250 locations in four cities across Bangladesh and are patronized by nearly twenty-thousand members.

Jiang Yanyong was cited for his "brave stand for truth" when the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) began to spread in early 2003 beyond its origin in Guandong Province.

At "great risk," the retired military doctor exposed an attempt by China’s health minister to "grossly" understate the number of SARS cases. Because of his warning, a comprehensive monitoring system was put in place by June and a national catastrophe was averted.

The RMAF found the fourth-grade education of Thailand’s Prayong Ronnarong superior to the insights of "development experts with PhDs."

A farmer in the Mairieng sub-district, Prayong joined in the rubber boom of the early 1960s. But after a crash in the prices of the "promising cash crop," he led other farmers in building a rubber processing plant to make high-quality latex that would sell for higher prices.

Thanks to his example, there were over a hundred community-owned latex factories in his province by 1996.

The "peace" awardees, Laxminarayan Ramdas and Ibn Abdur Rehman, were cited for founding and leading the Pakistan—India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy.

From 1995, the forum drew hundreds of Indians and Pakistanis in promoting "demilitarization, denuclearization and peace" based on "mutual arms reductions and troop pullbacks."

But from its initial concerns about the "armed standoff" between the two nuclear powers, the Forum has grown to embrace other issues like the environment and women’s rights.

The Magsaysay Award’s social orientation was not lost on RMAF president Carmencita Abella, who praised the awardees for "making a real difference in their respective societies" through their leadership, convictions and "earnest compassion."

"This year’s Magsaysay awardees continue this tradition of ‘greatness of spirit’ in selfless service to the people," she said. "In a world increasingly burdened by conflict, inequity and cynicism, these remarkable Asians are acting boldly and effectively to address critical social concerns, in ways that inspire collaboration and hope. By the force of their convictions these remarkable men and women are transforming Asia for the better."

The other members of the RMAF board are Juan Santos, Randolf S. David, Cayetano W. Paderanga Jr., Emily Abrera, Ma. Cynthia Rose Bautista, Victoria Garchitorena, Jaime Ramon Paredes and Fr. Bernardo Ma. Perez, OSB.