Peace Prize for a President
Previous winners of the Nobel Peace Prize:
1906 - Theodore Roosevelt: helped to end the Russo-Japanese war and provided the International Criminal Court at the Hague with its very first case.
1919 - Woodrow Wilson: Laboured to set up the League of Nations, the first international body for diplomacy
(Aside: Did you know the peace prize wasn’t awarded between 1939-43, the first five years of WWII?)
1960 - Alburt Lutuli: led a struggle against Apartheid in SA
1964 - Martin Luther King, Jnr: led a fatal campaign for civil rights for ‘black’ Americans
1974 - Eisako Sato: Despite being the Prime Minister of the only country in the world to experience nuclear war, chose to renounce nuclear development in Japan.
1978 - Mohamad Anwar Al-Sadat and Menachim Begin: Signed the Camp David Accord which brokered peace between Egypt and Israel
1979 - Mother Teresa
1991 - Aung San Suu Kyi: for a pronounced, democratically led struggle against human rights abuses in Burma
1993 – Nelson Mandela for his work in ending Apartheid in South Africa
1996 Jose Ramos-Horta for his work in exile to end conflict in East Timor
2007 – Al Gore, for alerting the world to the impact of climate change
2009 – Barack Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
Barack Obama is an amazing man, a gifted politician, and will go down in history as the first African-American president in the USA. As of yet, however, I do not believe his work has been comparable to many of the illustrious winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. ‘Strengthening diplomacy’ should not a Nobel Prize make. Not when there are still US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; and not when there has been no serious effort to bring together the leaders of Palestine and Israel to talk.
I am not saying he won’t come to deserve it. He is not even a year into his presidency, and there is little doubt he will achieve great things. But I think the award comes a little too soon. (Particularly when you consider that nominations for the Peace Prize closed on Obama’s 11th day in office).
Unless it is a brilliant tactical measure on the part of the Nobel committee, who have just made it utterly impossible for Barack Obama to declare war on anyone – the irony would be too destructive to bear.
written by Jennifer Blake
Paul Sheehan writes on the subject in today’s herald:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/peace-prize-becomes-a-travesty-20091011-gs9f.html
