"No Enemies and no Hatred"

China managed to urgently and belligerently persuade Afghanistan, Columbia, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Sudan, Tunisia, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam to absent themselves officially from the awarding in Norway of the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

That award has now taken place, and it did so in the presence of 40 diplomats whose countries defied Beijing's boycott call. Those who chose to boycott the ceremony revealed their own lack of commitment to observing and honouring human rights. In the process ensuring that they would be exempt from a powerful country's wrathful exacting of vengeance through economic disentitlements.

Those countries which mounted an official presence at the award ceremony have been assured by China that it will seek revenge upon them for their perfidious actions, upholding the human rights of a declared Chinese criminal. A man whose mission in life is clearly to embarrass and harass China, in causing unforgivable lack of face for China on the world stage. A man committed to causing that dreaded disharmony in the country.

A man whose statement to those who put him on trial and sent him to prison for 11 years on charges of sedition, was repeated, read out aloud to those present at the ceremony. His heartfelt appeal to China's dictators may not have made a positive impression on them, but it most certainly did to those who heard it during the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremonies.

"I want to say to this regime which is depriving me of my freedom, I have no enemies and no hatred.
"Many will ask whether China's weakness, for all the strength the country is currently showing, is not manifested in the need to imprison a man for 11 years merely for expressing his opinions on how his country should be governed.
Merely for publishing different political views and taking part in a peaceful democracy movement, a teacher lost his lectern, a writer lost his right to publish, and a public intellectual lost the opportunity to give talks publicly."

"I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart", he wrote to and of his wife, in his absence. "Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin."

Liu Xiaobo is not overly critical of the manner in which he was handled, only the lengthy and unearned privilege of the first-hand experience of what it feels like to languish in a Chinese prison far from those he loves and who love him, for his sin of entreating his country to live up to its international obligations it committed to when it signed the United Nations Human Rights covenants.

And in his audacity to point out to the country's governing elite that their very own constitution enshrines human rights' entitlement, in the declaration that states "the state respects and guarantees human rights".