Malaysia has scrapped an invitation for Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi to deliver a speech about Islam because of pressure from Iranian diplomats who warned the event could hurt bilateral ties, an official said yesterday.
Ebadi, who won the peace prize in 2003 for her work advocating greater rights for women and children in Iran, has often been at odds with her country’s hard-line government. Tehran has banned her Center for Protecting Human Rights in 2006, claiming it did not have a permit.
Ebadi had agreed to give a speech titled “Islam and Cultural Diversity” at Kuala Lumpur’s University of Malaya on Nov. 3, but the Malaysian Foreign Ministry sent a letter to organizers last month “strongly advising” them not to host her, an organizing official said.
A Foreign Ministry official in the department that sent the letter said he had no immediate comment. The official cannot be named because of ministry guidelines.
“We were told there would be big implications for bilateral relations,” the organizing official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “Our hands were tied. The invitation for her to speak had to be withdrawn.”
Organizers were informed that the Iranian embassy had objected to the planned speech and “were pushing for Malaysia to call it off,” the organizing official said. They were also warned that Iranian university students living in Malaysia might hold protests in Ebadi’s presence.
The speech was supposed to kick off a series of talks in Malaysia and Thailand over the next few months initiated by the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation. Other speakers will include US civil rights speaker Jesse Jackson and East Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta.
Ebadi was among the first women judges in Iran, before being removed from her job after the Islamic revolution in 1979. She has since become an attorney and a human-rights activist.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS