Norwegian commentator: Nobel Peace Prize has fallen into disrepute
Recent Nobel Peace Prize winners indicates the Norwegian Nobel Committee lacked sound analysis and even disregarded facts, a Norwegian pundit has said in a recent commentary.
Such flawed practices, Hege Ulstein said in the Saturday issue of local daily Dagsavisen, meant the foundation of the Nobel Peace Prize conferments in recent years was weak, including the latest one to a convicted Chinese criminal named Liu Xiaobo.
As evidence of the Nobel Committee's problematic approach, she cited a report by Norway's state broadcaster NRK about the controversy over Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
The NRK coverage revealed that, although Norwegian foreign aid agency NORAD and the foreign ministry warned as early as in 1998 that Yunus embezzled foreign assistance and his microcredit-providing Grameen Bank made some borrowers even poorer, the committee turned a deaf ear.
More worrisome, however, was how then Nobel Committee Chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes and Norwegian Nobel Institute Director Geir Lundestad responded to the disclosure, Ulstein said.
Lundestad argued that, during his 20-year service at the Nobel Institute, nobody gained more credit from domestic and foreign experts than Yunus did. Yet his defense, Ulstein noted, gave birth to two troubling scenarios.
The Nobel Committee either paid no heed to information offered by the Norwegian foreign ministry, or did so awkward a job in background checks that it could not find problems, he said.
As to Mjoes' response that the committee "felt" that the awarding was a good thing, Ulstein noticed that Mjoes used "felt" instead of "thought," which she said implied that the committee just followed a feeling when choosing among the candidates.
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