At around 5:09 am on an October morning, the White House Situation room, which monitors global on-goings on behalf of the President of The United States, sent an e-mail to the White House Staff. The message had a subject-tag which said: ‘Item of Interest’. Soon after this, around 6:00 am White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs called President Barack Obama to tell him news that would bring for Mr. Obama much praise and honor but with it many raised eyebrows and a lot of controversy.
We in India came to know about the news the same day, 9th October, 2009. ‘Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize’ declared the Times of India’s official web-site for his ‘extra-ordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples’. At first, I didn’t believe it. Well, as a matter of fact no one around me believed what they were reading. I thought let’s wait for tomorrow’s newspaper, and then we’ll confirm it once and for all. And there it was in the newspapers…. Obama had indeed won the Nobel Peace Prize. I don’t know what the general public in India felt about this, but I was disappointed.
Just days before this news; I had read an article in The Sunday Indian claiming that the most prestigious of all Nobel Prizes: the Nobel Peace Prize was slowly reducing in grandeur because of the strange way in which personalities are nominated and selected for this award. An interesting fact is that, since 1990s 50% of the Peace laureates had either visited Norway or had done something favorable for Norway or won some kind of Norwegian Award. Since the 2000s most of the Nobel Peace Laureates had got positive publicity in Norway. Upon reading this I had concluded it to be some critics’ vague interpretation of mere coincidences. But then Obama getting the Nobel was strange enough for me to open Wikipedia and search for the previous Noble Laureates. I found some more strange facts.
The Peace Prize has been given to some really deserving personalities, few of them who have changed the way the world looked at the term peace. Albert Schweitzer, Desmond Tatu, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., The 14th Dalai Lama can undoubtedly be called the champions of Human Rights. Barack Obama is the third sitting President of the United States who has been awarded with the Peace Prize. The previous two were Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 for his mediation in ending the Russo-Japanese War and Woodrow Wilson in 1919 for Founding the League of Nations. Henry Kissinger won the Peace Prize for mediation in negotiations after the Vietnam War in 1973, he was the Secretary of State for the US then. Jimmy Carter, also a President of the US, has won the Prize for his continued efforts for World Peace, but he was not in office then.
What’s strange in this is that, most of the US diplomats have won the Prize after ending a war in which directly or indirectly they were involved. I especially found Woodrow Wilson’s candidature strange. If the US was so concerned about Peace during World War-I it would have entered the war or brought about peace talks much earlier. But instead, what they did was stay outside the war and supply weapons to the war-making countries. They obviously were amassing a lot of profit from these ventures but were definitely not making peace. US continued this until some of their own citizens died in some ship in the English waters. Woodrow Wilson was the President in this period.
This can hardly be called peace efforts by a country so business minded that they did not mind selling weapons even while half of the globe was killing each other. And after the war ends what we see is the President of this country getting the Peace Prize. Hah, what a joke! And even if we consider that he was given the Prize considering only the foundation of the League of Nations not withstanding any things his country had done before, what significant things did the League do anyway? First thing that it did was allowing the signing the Treaty of Versailles, which in my opinion is not compatible with human rights. I mean, which treaty imposes so harsh restrictions on the citizens of a country, because their leaders were over-ambitious. The leaders no doubt should have been duly punished, but why impose them on the citizens. And the founder of such a League which allows anti-human right Treaties to be imposed on a country is given the Nobel Peace Prize!
One more important piece of info regarding the Prize for Henry Kissinger is that it was actually awarded to two people: Henry Kissinger from US and Le Dorc Tho from Vietnam. Both were given the Prize for their joint efforts in Vietnam for bringing about peace after the Vietnam War. But interestingly, Le Dorc Tho did not accept the prize saying there still wasn’t peace in Vietnam yet and so he could not accept the prize. While Kissinger, obviously, accepted the prize for stopping a war which his own government has started. The debate on this award was so heated up that two Nobel committee members resigned.
Anyway considering all this, Barack Obama has done nothing but showered promises as yet. Incidently, considering the last date of nomination for the peace prize, Barack Obama was nominated just a couple of weeks after he took office. God alone knows, what the committee saw in these two weeks that they accepted the nomination! After the Prize was awarded one of the many reactions was this from an Israeli citizen working in London. He said: “Love the dude, but all he’s done on the peace side of things is making a few nice speeches and not go to war with anyone else. They are handing him the Nobel Peace Prize because he isn’t George Bush.” Thomas Friedman in one of his columns said that Europeans are much more relaxed now that Obama is running the US rather than Bush and this is what inspired the Norwegian committee to award him. In my opinion, if the committee had not found any candidate better than Obama, the Prize should not have been given this year. Obama’s Prize is nothing but an expression of hope for a better world than an award for a notable achievement.
Whatever be the circumstances, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama for that matter do not deserve to stand besides Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa or Desmond Tutu and claim that they are equals with these people.
Going by the requirements put forward by Alfred Nobel in his will, the Nobel Peace Prize should be awarded to people who during the preceding year shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. Obama, I’m afraid, has done nothing of this. He has just started working towards fraternity between US and the middle-east but not achieved anything yet. He has not abolished standing armies in Iran or Afghanistan. Even after getting the award, during his Asia visit in December, he could have taken up the Kashmir issue or the Tibet issue or the issue of Chinese claiming Arunachal Pradesh but all he did was to praise China for its economic growth. Taking up another subject, Gandhi should have been awarded the Peace Prize, at least he satisfies the criteria set by Alfred Nobel. Martin Luther King Jr. himself was a true believer in Gandhian ideals. Agreed, Gandhi has had his share of controversies, but he did one very important thing and that was to bring the Indians together through non-violent means. He did not abolish but better, he did not allow standing armies in India during independence struggle and he definitely held many meeting for promoting peace activities. He bailed India out of violence or else God only knows what the charged up Indian youth would have done. And while Gandhi was nominated for the Peace Prize in 1948, in 1948 the Prize wasn’t awarded to anyone. It was possible that he could have been given the Prize posthumously but in the same year the tradition of giving posthumous Prizes was abolished.
I don’t know, and now I no longer care, what the world says about Obama and the peace prize, all I’ve got to say is that I’ve lost my faith in this award…..
