JOHANNESBURG – Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is for the second year running tipped to win the Nobel Peace Prize after bookmakers listed him among hopefuls to land the 2010 award.
Tsvangirai was in 2009 among the favourites to win the peace Nobel for that year that was eventually won by US President Barack Obama.
Bookmaker PaddyPower.com are giving Tsvangirai 8-to-1 odds of winning the peace Nobel alongside former UN rights commissioner Mary Robinson, in a field led by Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo who the bookmakers have given 6-to-1 odds of landing what many consider the world’s best award.
The son of a poor peasant farmer, Tsvangirai first rose to prominence in the 90s as the leader of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, the country’s main union, fighting for better pay and living conditions for impoverished workers.
He later founded the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party to try to end President Robert Mugabe’s increasingly iron fisted rule, but met with increased repression from the veteran leader.
Tsvangirai has survived assassination attempts, been brutally assaulted and tortured, while several hundreds of his supporters have been killed during a 10-year struggle to topple Mugabe and his ZANU PF party from power.
Tsvangirai almost succeeded in dethroning Mugabe when the MDC defeated ZANU PF in a parliamentary poll in 2008, while he beat the veteran president in a parallel presidential election but with fewer votes to avoid a decisive second round run-off ballot.
Analysts had strongly tipped Tsvangirai to win the run-off election but he withdrew from the race citing state-sponsored attacks against his supporters. His withdrawal allowed Mugabe to win uncontested.
But Mugabe’s blood-soaked victory was rejected by the international community including some of his African allies forcing him to agree to form a power-sharing government with Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara.
Liu, the bookmaker’s favourite to win the Nobel, is a poet and literature professor, who is serving an 11-year jail term for “inciting subversion of state power” — after signing a 2008 manifesto calling for democratic reform in China.
Others whose names have been mentioned as possible contenders for this year’s peace Nobel are Afghan women’s rights campaigner Sima Samar and the Democratic Voice of Burma, a media group that broadcast pro-democracy messages into the army-controlled country.
The Memorial, a human rights group working in the former Soviet Union countries is also among those seen as likely to win the world’s top accolade. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in Oslo on Oct. 8. ZimOnline
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