Winners of 2018 Ramon Magsaysay awards announced in Manila
Asia’s Nobel Prize goes to winners including Cambodian genocide survivor and Indian psychiatrist
Six people were honoured Friday as this year’s winners of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards, known as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize, including 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.
The others who received the prize at a ceremony in Manila were 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, which were announced last month, are named after a Philippine president who died in a 1957 plane crash.
“All this effort that I have been trying for so many decades is not in vain, it’s been recognised,” said Youk Chhang, who lost his father, five of his siblings and nearly 60 of his relatives during the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime and subsequent civil war in the 1970s.
He escaped as a refugee to the United States before returning home to head a centre that documented the horrific violence in aid of Cambodian war crimes trials.
Youk Chhang said in an interview earlier this week that his recognition was also “a message to other institutions, to other countries around the world that learning from the past mistakes is significant, is important even though Cambodia has a long way to go”.