NEW YORK, Oct 11: Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban for campaigning for girl’s education, spoke of the possibility of winning this year’s Nobel Peace Prize and said she might like to be Pakistan’s prime minister one day.
“If I get the Nobel Peace Prize, I think it will be such a great honor, and more than I deserve, and such a great responsibility as well,” she told an audience at a New York City cultural center last night.
A win would “help me to begin this campaign for girls’ education, but the real goal, the most precious goal that I want to get and for which I am thirsty and I want to struggle hard for, that is the award of seeing every child to go to school,” she added.
Yousafzai, 16, a favorite among experts and betting agencies to be named the winner of the prestigious prize, which is to be announced on Friday, was in conversation with journalist Christiane Amanpour, at the 92nd Street Y, a cultural center in Manhattan.
After receiving death threats from the Taliban for defying the Islamist militant group with her outspoken views on the right to education, Yousafzai was shot a year ago while on a school bus near her village in Swat in northwestern Pakistan.
“You may call him a boy,” she said of her shooter, describing him as barely older than herself. She recovered after she was flown to Britain for surgery.
Yousafzai started her campaigning by writing a blog in 2009 in which she described how the Taliban prevented girls like her from going to school. She said being shot had only strengthened her resolve.
“They can only shoot a body, they cannot shoot my dreams,” she said. “They shot me because they wanted to tell me that, ‘we want to kill you and to stop you campaigning’, but they did the biggest mistake: they inured me, and they told me through that attack, that even death is supporting me, even death does not want to kill me.”
(AGENCIES)
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