 Suzanne Scholte |
US Western Sahara Foundation Lauds Seoul Peace Prize Committee for Recognizing Sahrawi Human Rights Activist, Suzanne Scholte
LaJolla, California ... Carlos Wilson, Executive Director of the US-Western Sahara Foundation, today lauded the Seoul Peace Prize Committee for awarding human rights activist, Suzanne Scholte, the Seoul Peace Prize for her work for the Sahrawi refugees of Western Sahara and the North Korean people.
“For the Seoul Peace Prize Committee to bestow this honor on a Sahrawi human rights activist is a great honor to all of us involved helping the Sahrawi people,” said Wilson. “This prestigious award given by some of the most important leaders in Korea will raise international awareness of this little known issue that has huge global significance.”
Citing the areas in which Scholte has been active, Wilson said, “Moroccan-Occupied Western Sahara, where Sahrawis have no rights and are brutally treated by Moroccan authorities, and Kim Jong-il’s North Korea continually make the top ten list of the world’s worst regimes rated by human rights organizations.”
As part of her efforts for the Sahrawis, Scholte has sponsored over 45 Congressional fact finding missions to the Sahrawi refugee camps which has led to great activism by Americans on behalf of the refugees. She has also organized 9 Capitol Hill forums and receptions, and testified before Congress and the United Nations calling for a referendum on self-determination.
Inspired by the Sahrawis’ noble struggle, Scholte said she would accept the award on behalf of the “Sahrawi refugees of Western Sahara, who are seeking self-determination and the right to live as a free people through peaceful and democratic means” as well as the North Korean defectors.
Scholte's commitment to the Sahrawi refugees is evidenced by the fact that her two oldest children have been to their refugee camps in the Sahara desert twice while her husband has visited six times. When her children traveled there at the ages of 7 and 10 in 1998, they were the first American children to have ever visited the camps.
When the first hearing on the North Korean political prison camps was held in 1999 representatives from two different embassies attended: the embassy of the Republic of Korea and the embassy of the Sahrawi Republic. Sahrawi Republic Ambassador Moulud Said personally attended the hearing because, like the Korean people, the Sahrawi people know first hand the pain of a divided country and separated families. When Morocco invaded the Western Sahara in 1975, thousands of Sahrawis fled. During its occupation Morocco built a berm dividing the country, and like Korea’s DMZ it is impassable, littered with land mines and soldiers separating families and preventing the Sahrawis from escaping to their loved ones in the free part of Western Sahara.
For further information contact, Carlos Wilson at 858-755-9440.