Much controversy has arisen over the bestowal of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize last week to President Obama, who had been nominated before even being elected president.
Alfred Nobel, the founder of the award, specifically stated that it go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." While Obama is making a concerted effort to solve world issues through diplomacy, it does seem clear that he is not worthy of the award.
It is the belief of the Daily that the Nobel committee should generally refrain from awarding any politician its Peace Prize. A fundamental part of being a successful politician is pandering to the public and cutting deals — a public official's main focus rarely lines up directly with Alfred Nobel's vision. Though most politicians do want to foster peace, and Obama certainly does, there are other individuals who devote their lives to social activism and are not hindered by the complexities of being a politician. It is these individuals who deserve to be recognized, and the Nobel committee would do the world a great service by highlighting this type of outstanding activist, who too often goes unnoticed by the public eye.
The committee has been rightfully chastised in the past for awarding the Peace Prize to politicians with spotty records. In 1973, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger received the prize for ending the Vietnam War, despite his role in expanding the war and fostering great instability in Southeast Asia. Even North Vietnamese peace negotiator Le Duc Tho, who received the prize along with Kissinger, returned his award in disgust. Theodore Roosevelt, who oversaw a bloody, inhumane war in the Philippines during his tenure as our 26th president, received the prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Mikhail Gorbachev essentially won because he eventually realized that the Soviet Union was falling apart and decided it was better to let go than keep fighting the inevitable. The Nobel committee overlooked the middling nature of these politicians' achievements, ostensibly for the purpose of presenting the award to someone famous.
But the Nobel committee has not amassed a record of total failure. Eliezer Wiesel, a concentration camp survivor, won the award in 1986 for forcing a resistant world to acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust, and for his continued work to promote tolerance of Jews around the world. René Cassin, who received the award in 1968, drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, presided over the European Court of Human Rights and headed many NGOs. The 2006 winner, Muhammad Yunus, created the Grameen Bank, which provides microloans to impoverished people, assisting them in rising out of destitution. On the global scale, these humanitarians were little-known before the committee recognized them, but they are among the recipients who best embodied Alfred Nobel's vision.
The Nobel committee should concentrate on awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to activists who are committed to a cause and work diligently to highlight humanitarian issues that are not necessarily widely known to the public. Such endeavors are becoming increasingly important as we moved toward a globalized society and economy. Recognizing the efforts of people who are quietly creating a better world is a much more effective way to cultivate peace and global awareness than handing out the award to supposedly altruistic, bigwig politicians.
