London:
The number of governments which have decided not to be represented when the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo this week has more than tripled to 19, the Norwegian prize committee said on Tuesday, an apparent reflection of the strong pressure exerted by Beijing to boycott the event.
In a statement on its Web site, the peace prize committee said that as of Monday, 44 embassies in Oslo, the Norwegian capital, had signaled their intention to send a representative to the ceremony on Friday. But the number who "for various reasons declined our invitations" had risen to 19 from 6 three weeks ago.
Those countries are China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Serbia, Iraq , Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Sudan, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco.
China has been incensed by Mr. Liu's award. For its part, the prize committee has said that for the first time since 1936, the medal and diploma that accompany the prize will not be handed over because neither Mr. Liu, who is in prison, nor members of his family have been permitted to travel to Oslo to receive them.
Mr. Liu, 54, is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion.
Mr. Liu's wife, Liu Xia, has been held incommunicado since the award was announced in October and the government has been waging an offensive to rebrand the prize as a Western ploy to undermine the Chinese Communist Party's hold on power.
Geir Lundestad, the committee's secretary, said there will be an empty chair and a portrait of Mr. Liu on the podium as the rest of the glittery ceremony proceeds with speeches and musical interludes some, at Mr. Liu's request, by children's choirs.
Reuters quoted Chinese officials as saying supporters of Mr. Liu are fundamentally opposed to China's development and trying to interfere in the country's politics and legal system.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, told reporters: "I would like to say to those at the Nobel committee, they are orchestrating an anti-China farce by themselves."
"We are not changing because of interference by a few clowns and we will not change our path," she said, according to Reuters.
Invitations to the ceremony are routinely sent only to those 65 countries with embassies in Oslo, Mr. Lundestad said in a telephone interview. Those who accepted included "all the western countries" along with representatives from other countries including India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea and Japan, he said.
He said there had been reports suggesting that the prize might be handed over to people other than Mr. Liu's close family, but that was not the case. "We assume that no close family will be coming," he said. "But if someone surfaces, we can change very quickly."
According to the Nobel Web site, the last time no one was present to accept the peace medal was in 1936, when the German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who had been awarded the prize in 1935, was not allowed to leave Nazi Germany in either year.
Since then, the prize has been received on at least three occasions by family members of the recipients, including the son of the Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi who delivered the acceptance speech on behalf of his mother.
Additionally, the prize was not awarded between 1914 and 1918 and between 1939 and 1943 because of the two world wars.
In World War II, Norway was under Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945. In 1944, the International Committee of the Red Cross was named but the prize was handed over in 1945 after the war ended, according to the Nobel Web site.