Lionel, Rihanna Perform At Nobel Peace Prize Concert

Hollywood actress Sharon Stone, the former Cat Stevens and singer Lionel Richie were among those at a star-studded concert Monday honoring Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus’ efforts to relieve poverty. The laureate’s daughter was also there to pay tribute.

“I am honored to be part of this very, very great day in my father’s life,” said Monica Yunus, 29, an opera singer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, speaking before the concert. Her father was standing on stage with her when she sang a few hours
later.

“It has taken him 30 years to get the message across,” she said of her father’s work to provide loans to poor Bangladeshis. “I think he really just wants to realize the dream of putting poverty in the museum.”

At the concert, Yunus himself joked with the crowd of about 7,000 that “I feel like I should get the Nobel Prize every year. It’s so much fun.”

He also urged everyone to share his dream of a day “when nobody will be a poor person.”

Other performers at the traditional Nobel Peace Prize concert included 18-year-old music star Rihanna, the British pop band Simply Red, American opera singer Renee Fleming and Mexican singer and actress Paulina Rubio.

Richie, a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, said at a news conference it was time to line up world stars again to sing for poverty relief, 20 years after he and other stars recorded “We Are the World” to raise funds for famine relief in Africa.

“We thought we were going to eradicate hunger throughout the world,” Richie said, urging his fellow stars in Oslo to join him. “Now it’s 20 years later and we’re still discussing the same issue.”

Bangladeshi economist Yunus received the award Sunday for his program of microeconomics, giving tiny loans to the poor to help them escape poverty through their own initiative. However, the prize committee said the award was also intended to build bridges between the West and Islamic countries like Bangladesh.

“Because of that (bridge building), in a way, that I have come back to singing,” said the former Cat Stevens, who changed his name to Yusuf Islam when he converted to Islam in the late 1970s and dropped out of music. “On this occasion, peace is a theme and bridge building is intensified.”

Stone, who co-hosted the concert with Anjelica Huston, said, “I am an enormous admirer of Mr. Yunus’ work, and our family is also very much in admiration of his work.” Her sister, she explained, had represented Yunus’ efforts at the United Nations this year.

She noted that 30 years ago, when Yunus began lending Bangladesh’s poor tiny amounts out of his own pocket, people thought he was crazy for saying millions could be helped in the same way. Now the Grameen Bank he founded has about 7 million poor borrowers, and the idea of microcredit has spread around the world.