Nobel Prize for Peace

Nihon Hidankyo, the 2024 Peace prize award winner, represents the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was formed in 1956. Could the gesture resonate with the political leaders that are pushing the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust both in the 3-year conflict that is leaving Ukraine in ruins, and in the 1-year genocidal war of Israel against the Arab peoples? Nothing is less certain, judging from the Nobel committee past performances.

On 6 October 2023 the Nobel Committee announced the award of the Nobel Peace prize to Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian woman-rights advocate, for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all. The timing was quite weird. The following day, on the 7th, the Palestinian organization Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, adding another pivotal armed conflict to the 18-month old Ukraine war.

Apparently, the Nobel committee was unable to gauge the state of play, helpless to perceive the signs of a world at the brink of a colossal breakdown. Awarding a woman-rights activist was likely the best that the Nobel committee could do, short of any ideas, means and will to contribute to calming down the conflicts ravaging the eastern Europe, western Asia, central Asia and central Africa. For the Nobel committee it was probably more pressing to hoist the woman-rights flag, than to try and appease the fighting frenzies that have already caused several hundreds of thousands of casualties, massive destruction of property, and risk to set the whole world in flames.

The Nobel prize for peace was inaugurated with the award to Henry Dunant, the Swiss who designed and created the Red Cross, after having witnessed and described in his report "A Memory of Solferino" the horrid extent of the life losses and human sufferings in the one-day battle of 24 June 1859 during the Austrian-French war. Dunant's initiative truly contributed henceforth to save many lives and to alleviate the pains caused by war and violence against individuals all over the world. However, the list of his successors raises deep concerns about the committee's drives and motivations, as it includes less deserving, and sometimes less than commendable, individuals and institutions.

A few recent instances are revealing of the bedlam prevailing within the Nobel committee. US President Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2009, just as he was taking office, before being able to inaugurate any executive motion either in favor of peace or war. On the quiet, he was already concocting bellicose initiatives that would soon turn into the Afghanistan escalation, the worldwide targeted assassination program, or the military interventions in Libya, Yemen, Somalia or Syria — to cut a long story short, he was already planning the extension of both open and covert war to the most remote places on earth, no borders, no sanctuaries barred.

Then, in 2012, the European Union (EU) was laureated at the very moment when the organization's non-elected bureaucrats were driving financial austerity, economic havoc and social chaos throughout Europe. Alas, EU's black record is not limited to the social and economic fields, it also extends to warfare. EU is by and large accountable for the barbaric, blood chilling wars in the Balkans in the 1990s, the 2008 Georgia's South Ossetia war, and the on-going high-intensity international war in Ukraine. Non content with bringing war back in-house or to the bordering geographies, the EU engaged in a diplomacy of intimate collusion with NATO, with a view to further United States' and EU's interests in eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East and Central Asia, of which the military interventions in Libya, Mali, Afghanistan or Syria are damning examples. In a less than peace-loving gesture, the EU zealously strives to prevent the refugees that it hatched abroad from flooding into its territory by any available means, including drowning in the Mediterranean waters.

The 2016 Nobel for peace awarded to Colombia's President Santos, may stem from good intentions — it is supposed to honor the effort to achieve peace with the Colombian FARC rebels. It resulted however in another botched initiative. For starters, if the prize was aimed at recognizing the peace deal, as explicitly mentioned, why did the Nobel people forget the other party at the negotiation talks — it takes two to strike a deal, doesn't it? Then, just as the announcement was being made, Colombians rejected the peace accord in a referendum, thus exposing the Nobel committee's inability to really understand what was going on.

On March 21 2020, the 2019 laureate Abiy Ahmed, the Prime minister of Ethipia, questioned on sexual violence in Tigray during a parliamentary session could callously reply: "The women in Tigray? These women have only been penetrated by men, whereas our soldiers were penetrated by a knife" ¹. Such a mindset is not surprising for someone capable of waging a brutal campaign against his own people and creating a humanitarian crisis that puts millions of civilians at risk. Subtleties that the perceptive Nobel committee could hardly anticipate, or could it?

The 2022 award was another attempt to shape reality to keep public opinion under influence. During eight years of larval war in the Donbass, the Nobel Committee made no visible efforts to help enforce the Minsk agreements, or to promote any peace making initiatives worth of note. But as the conflict turned into an international war, following the February 2022 Russian intervention in Ukraine, it selected the nominees that could best put Russia on the spot, adding fuel to the fire.

In many instances, the Nobel prize for peace looks like a sneaky attempt to play West-serving diplomatic games and to model public opinion, rather than a candid acknowledgment and recognition of genuinely dedicated peace-promoting work. But, after all, this is consistent with the Nobel narrative. Alfred Nobel himself has been greeted as someone "who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before", as said in his erroneous obituary published in 1888.

   Take a look at the complete list of Nobel prizes for peace

¹ World Peace Foundation