The politics of the Nobel Peace Prize
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Where Nobel Prizes are awarded for verifiable feats that meet Alfred Nobel's expressed will, the winners and their fellow countrymen – and indeed the academic world – acknowledge and celebrate a prize well deserved. But at times the awards have been seen as having gone off the track charted by its original initiator. This is particularly so with the Peace Prize, now clearly being awarded for purposes other than peace –even to persons commanding wars or advocating other than peaceful change or resolution to national conflicts.
Some Peace Prize awards could have caused Alfred Nobel to turn in his grave. Others, while not so earth-shattering, have also left even their recipients bewildered. South Africa's Nelson Mandela did not receive his Nobel Peace Prize while in prison. And India's Mahatma Gandhi never received a Nobel prize– not even posthumously, as did Sweden's Erik Axel Karifeldt, who had turned down the Poetry prize.
There's more contradiction. The French-speaking Antillean island of Guadeloupe's Saint-John Perse – who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 and was the very first Caribbean islander to win a Nobel Prize – is registered under France, because the island he lived and worked in was (and still is) a French Caribbean colony, officially described as an "Overseas Department" of France.
There's also the interesting case of Bangladesh's Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank in 1976 and was awarded a Peace prize 30 years later, and not the Economics prize that many expected.
A Nobel Prize is not won through a transparent world public competition. The final decision rests with the respective Nobel awarding entities, which consider themselves accountable to no one outside the Foundation. The decision to award someone imprisoned in China through that country's legal and judicial process was, therefore, a decision of a panel of Norwegian politicians. They knew and acknowledged that their decision would irritate the government of the PRC. But, for them, it would also generate some desired and intended political and media attention leading up to the December 10 award ceremony in Sweden.
Those awarding the Nobel Peace Prize, helped by their supporters in the Western press, have established a pattern with such controversial choices, which is at play in the case of China. After the 2010 winner was named in October, the campaign began. Signatures were sought and got, inside China, albeit from a small group of individuals, supporting Liu Xiaobo's release and criticizing the Chinese government on human rights grounds. They would most likely demand Liu's release to allow him to personally collect the prize at the award ceremony. Failing this, they would, quite possibly, invite his wife to accept on his behalf. Or they will sell his legal imprisonment as a violation of his human rights. Either way, the anti-China press will have a field day, and Liu's case will be given elevated status.
The European political attitude to human rights has not changed since the Cold War. Press and politicians are expected to sing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to inflexible criticism of what they consider human rights abuses elsewhere.
The author is a journalist from St. Lucia. embousquet@hotmail.com
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