The Nobel Peace Prize: six controversial winners and a major omission in history-BBC News

When former US President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, many people were puzzled, including the winner himself.

Obama wrote in his 2020 memoir that his first reaction to the news was to ask: “Why is this?”

At the time of the award, he took office as President of the United States for only 9 months, and critics said the decision to award him was too early.

In fact, he was nominated for an award earlier, because the deadline for nomination was the 12th day after Obama took office.

In 2015, Geir Lundestad, the former director of the Nobel Institute, told the BBC that the committee that decided on the award had no regrets about this decision.

During Obama’s two-term presidency, the US military fought three battles in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

In 1994, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Palestinian leader Arafat and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Simon Perez in recognition of their contributions to the signing of the Oslo Peace Agreement. Contribution. The agreement brought hope to the settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the 1990s.

However, the decision to award the Peace Prize to Arafat, a man who had participated in paramilitary activities, has aroused criticism in Israel and other countries.

In fact, the nomination of Arafat has also aroused different opinions within the Nobel Committee.

One of the members of the Nobel Peace Prize selection committee, the Norwegian politician Carre Christiansen, resigned in protest.

Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for leading Myanmar’s non-violent struggle against military rule.

But more than 20 years later, Aung San Suu Kyi was severely criticized for failing to express any objections to the mass murder of Rohingya Muslims and serious violations of human rights in Myanmar. The experience of the Rohingya in Burma is called “genocide” by the United Nations.

Some people even called for the cancellation of Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize, but according to Nobel Prize regulations, such an approach is not allowed.

In December 2020, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abi Ahmed was awarded the Peace Prize for his efforts to resolve the long-standing border conflict with neighboring Eritrea.

But after more than a year, the outside world began to question whether this award decision was correct.

The international community has criticized Abi Ahmed for deploying troops in northern Tigray.

The fighting there caused thousands of deaths and was described by the United Nations as “the devastation is horrible.”

Wangari Maathai of Kenya became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

But after her comments on HIV and AIDS came to light, her award was controversial.

She once said that the HIV virus is an artificial biological weapon with the purpose of eliminating blacks. But this is a claim that there is no scientific evidence to prove it.

In 1973, Henry Kissinger, then US Secretary of State, won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But he is a person who has participated in some of the most controversial events in US foreign policy, including secret bombing activities in Cambodia and support for military regimes that engage in murder in South America. Therefore, his award attracted a lot of attention.

It was the North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Kissinger. The joint award was to recognize their role in the Vietnam War ceasefire negotiations.

Li Deshou himself rejected the Peace Prize, and the other two Nobel Prize Committee members resigned in protest. At that time, the “New York Times” commented on Kissinger’s winning news that it was the Nobel War Prize.

There are many famous omissions in the history of the Nobel Prize.

In the category of peace awards, the most obvious omission should be Mahatma Gandhi, who led the Indian nonviolent movement for independence.

Despite being nominated several times, the Indian politician who became a symbol of the pacifist movement in the 20th century never won the Peace Prize.

In 2006, the Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad, then chairman of the Peace Prize selection committee, said that the failure of the Peace Prize to recognize Gandhi’s achievements was the biggest omission in the history of the Nobel Prize.