Ahmad Shah Masoud

The supporters include head of Afghan Interim Authority Hamid Karzai (who took patronage of the committee in March 2002), Czech president Vaclav Havel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate writer Elie Wiesel (who, still, voiced the sound doubts in advisability of giving the award posthumously), a host of Europarliament delegates, French, Italian and Belgian delegates and senators, ex France premier Michel Rocard, current French minister of internal affairs Nicolas Sarkozy and the recent country’s president seat contender Francois Bayrou. The list continues with a multitude of less-known and simply ordinary people, ranging from Afghans, resident both in their homeland and around the globe (including Moscow and Kiev), to the so far only Russian citizen Alexander Fedchenko from Moscow.
I can be sincere on two points. First, the doubts in the possibility of garnering the Nobel Peace Prize after life persist. Second, the award, once, to crown our joy, presented to Andrey Dmitrievich Sakharov, has lost much of its luster since, due to the ruling principles of notorious “political correctness”, not justice. And still, will these hundreds of votes for the hero of one just war, assassinated on the verge of another murderous clash, rouse someone’s personal or, if there is such phenomenon, collective consciousness? After all, we, too, once proposed toasts to the “triumph of our hopeless cause”, harboring little hope for living up to it eventually. Yet, we did. And the question on today’s agenda is whether we should avoid backing up another “hopeless cause”. The more so that the action of support is plain and safe – just putting one’s signature under the document (www.afghana.org). (http://www.massoud-nobel.org ëčáî http://www.massoud.fr.st).