The Nobel Peace Prize and the Problem of Respectability

By Colman McCarthy

Only occasionally does the Norwegian Nobel Committee award its peace prize to genuine risk-taking rebels who paid heavily for defying the world’s barbarians and warmakers. This year was not an occasion.

The 2005 winner, the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, represent little that is truly inspiring and even less in the way of daring peacemaking. The agency, part of the United Nations and based in Geneva, is an assembly of well-paid talkers who shuffle papers in offices, gab at conferences, issue reports, lunch with assorted diplomats and grandees, and wish for peace. ElBaradei, the chief wisher, is a Cairo-born Ph.D. who joined the agency in 1984. He is, no doubt a polite, urbane man and a fine dinner companion. But still, like his organization, ho-um conventional.

It might have been worse. Since 1901, the list of Nobel peace prize winners includes selections that range from ludicrous to laughable. There was Henry Kissinger in 1973, fresh from the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. In 1994 it was Yassar Arafat, the Palestinian warlord. In 1998, David Trimble, a Belfast functionary. In 1906, the belligerent Theodore Roosevelt. In 1919 Woodrow Wilson, a militarist, racist and sexist.

The most recent wrongheaded choice was Jimmy Carter, 2002. As a hawkish president, he warned that Middle East oil was vital to U.S. interests and pledged to keep it flowing “by any means necessary, including military force.” That was from “the Carter Doctrine,” which is now the Bush Doctrine, and one that the sainted Jimmy, haloed by the secular canonization of a Nobel, now condemns. It was Carter who ignored Archbishop Oscar Romero’s 1979 plea—“Christian to Christian”—not to send military aid to the Salvadoran government. The bloody 1980’s followed. It was Carter who began funding the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, with his CIA paying Islamic fundamentalists to take up arms against the invading Soviets. Among the funded? Osama bin Laden.

Amid the dross of the Kissingers, Arafats and Carters, luster can be found. Nobel peace laureates include those who have been jailed, persecuted and threatened with death for their beliefs and actions: Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina (1980), Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma (1991), Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos Horta of East Timor (1996), Lech Welesa of Poland (1983), Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala (1992), Kim Dae-Jung of South Korea (2000), Carl von Ossietzky of Germany (1935), Nelson Mandela of South Africa (1993), Andrei Sakharov of Russia (1975) and Martin Luther King, Jr., (1964).

This group accounts for less than 10 percent of the 112 winners, whether individuals or organizations, going back to 1901 after the King of Dynamite, Alfred Nobel, directed in his will that his money be used to bankroll peace.

Norway’s prize givers tend to play it safe. Not many pacifists or practitioners of nonviolence are chosen. Gandhi and Tolstoy were ignored, as was the Japanese pacifist Toyohiko Kagawa , It was not until 1960, when Albert Lituli, a black South African, won. The Nobel committee finally noticed that another world existed beyond the white western one.

Until pacifists whose commitments to nonviolence lead them to ignore personal safety, risk death or torture are consistently honored, rather than rarely, the Nobel peace prize is only half a notch above the Oscars of Hollywood. And about as quickly forgotten.