[NYTr] Gore's peace prize - a grand misjudgment

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

CounterPunch - Oct 12, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/oberg10122007.html


Gore's Peace Prize: A Grand Misjudgment

By Jan Oberg
Nagoya, Japan

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize - particularly the part to Al Gore - is a
populist choice that cannot but devalue the Prize itself.

Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the Peace Prize should be awarded to
"the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity
between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies
and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Without diminishing the importance of global warming and the work done
by this year's recipients - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Changes (IPCC) and Al Gore Jr. - it is highly disputable whether it
qualifies as a PEACE prize in the spirit of Alfred Nobel - even if
interpreted in the contemporary world situation and not that of 1895
when Nobel formulated his vision.

The concept and definition of peace should indeed be broad. But neither
of the recipients have made contributions that can match thousands of
other individuals and NGOs who devote their lives to fighting
militarism, nuclearism, wars, reducing violence, work for
peacebuilding, tolerance, reconciliation and co-existence - the core
issues of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It is also regrettable that the Prize rewards government-related work,
rather than civil society - Non-Governmentals, making the implicit point
that governments rather than the people make peace.

In particular, Al Gore - as vice-president under Bill Clinton between
1993 and 2001 was never heard or seen as a peace-maker. Clinton-Gore
had a crash program for building up US military facilities and made
military allies all around Russia - and missed history's greatest
opportunity for a new world order.

In contravention of international law and without a UN Security Council
mandate, they bombed Serbia and Kosovo, based on an extremely deficient
understanding of Yugoslavia and propaganda about genocide that has
caused the miserable situation called Kosovo today (likely to blow up
this year or the next), and they bombed in Afghanistan and Sudan.

The Prize would have been linked to the environment if it has been
awarded to someone who struggles against military or other violent
influence on the global environment: military pollution, thousands of
bases and exercises destroying nature, deliberate environmental
warfare, militarization of space and the oceans, and - of course -
nuclear weapons that, if used, would create more heat than global
warming.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee's consists of members who have little
background, if any, in the theory and practise of peace. That however
can not be an excuse for making a mockery of peace and the Prize itself.

The prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has been further reduced today -
adding to the disgrace that it never rewarded Gandhi but people like
Kissinger, Shimon Peres, and Arafat.

[Jan Oberg is director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and
Future Research in Lund, Sweden.]