Rights Group Children’s World Issues First Prizes

A slain Pakistani boy who rose from virtual slavery at a carpet factory to become a symbol of the fight against child labor was named Friday as the winner of the first World’s Children’s prize.

The nongovernmental Swedish rights organization Children’s World also honored Anne Frank and anti-apartheid activist Hector Peterson, saying “perhaps their names are the only ones of the 20th century’s billions of suffering children which the world still remembers.”

Sweden’s Queen Silvia will award the $81,000 prize money to relatives of the honorees Thursday at a ceremony at Gripsholms Castle in Mariefred, 30 miles west of the capital, Stockholm.

The winner, Iqbal Masih, was forced from the age of 5 to work in a carpet factory after his mother had borrowed from the factory’s owner to cover the cost of an operation, according to a news release announcing the prize winners. He escaped at 10, received help from activists, and was enlisted to speak to child-labor conferences in the United States and Sweden.

At 13, he was gunned down in Pakistan. Most activists believe it was a contract killing to stop him from speaking against carpet manufacturers.

About $69,500 will be used to establish the Iqbal Masih’s Freedom Center for the Rights of the Child in Pakistan, which among other things will finance the creation of a high school for child laborers.

“Iqbal wanted to be a lawyer so that he could work to free other debt-slave children,” his 15-year-old sister Sobia, who will accept Iqbal’s prize, was quoted as saying.

The prize will be renamed the Iqbal Masih Award for the Rights of the Child in his honor.

Anne Frank’s cousin Buddy Elias will accept $5,000 for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where the teenage girl hid from the Nazis and wrote her world-famous diary.

Antoinette Sithole, the sister of Peterson, who was shot to death at 12 by South African police at a protest against apartheid in Soweto, will accept a similar award that “will be used by the family because they’re having such a hard time,” Magnus Bergmar of Children’s World said.