Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has been awarded 2015 Confucius Peace Prize by China. The Prize is dubbed as Chinese equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mugabe is a former guerrilla fighter, who has ruled Zimbabwe with an iron fist for 35 years. He has been accused of rigging elections and having his opponents killed since the 1980s.
Mugabe is the latest in a series of critics of the West who have received the Confucius Peace Prize, first awarded in 2010 amid China’s anger over the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
Last year, the Confucius Peace Prize was awarded to Fidel Castro, the former Cuban leader. In 2011, the prize was given to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The first recipient, in 2010, was Lien Chan, a former party chairman of the Kuomintang in Taiwan.
Other previous winners include Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General (2012), and Yi Cheng, former president of China’s Buddhist Association (2013).
The prize has been mired in political battles. The founding committee had tenuous ties to the Chinese Ministry of Culture, but a split in the committee prompted the ministry to try to ban the prize in 2011. A rival group tried to award an alternative honor — the Confucius World Peace Prize — but the effort was called off.
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