Nobel Peace Prize laureates will gather in Hiroshima in early November to attend an international peace symposium, a nongovernmental organization hosting the event has announced.
The Dalai Lama of Tibet, Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Betty Williams from Northern Ireland are scheduled to address their messages to the world on peace from the city devastated by an atomic bomb in 1945. It will be the first occasion to have so many Nobel laureates visiting the city at the same time.
The Dalai Lama, who was awarded the peace prize in 1989 for his struggle for a peaceful solution of the Tibetan conflict, visited Hiroshima in 1995. He wrote a message in the visitor’s book at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum saying, “It is a duty of all humans to abolish this weapon with unimaginable destructive power from the ground of this planet.”
Tutu, an Anglican archbishop, also known as the Martin Luther King Jr. of South Africa, led the movement against apartheid and was awarded the prize in 1984. Williams, a protestant leader in Northern Ireland, became a laureate in 1976 for her role in the peace accord.
A spokesman for Peacebuilders’ Company, an NGO based in Hiroshima who invited the laureates along with young business leaders in the city, said, “We want to make a new step forward to achieve world peace by having the top activists of peace movements join us.”
