Nobel Peace Prize

Fifteen years ago I had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting Nelson Mandela in Cape Town while he was serving as President of South Africa. It was an odd occasion. I was a member of the International Commission on the Future of the Oceans, which was holding a meeting in South Africa. It happened that one of the vice chairs of the Commission was Kader Asmal, a cherished friend and a member of the first Mandela cabinet who himself played a major role in the writing of the South African Constition. Kader had arranged for Mandela to welcome the Commission to his country, and asked me if I would prepare some remarks on his behalf, which was for me an awesome assignment, but one that I undertook with trepidation, not at all confident that I could find the words to be of some slight help to this great man. Compounding my...

There are two ways of responding to an invitation from an American president. I recall that when Amory Lovins, the guru of market-oriented environmentalism, was asked about what was his main goal when invited to the White House to meet the president he responded self-assuredly: ‘To be invited back.” That is, be sure to say nothing that might so disturb the high and mighty to an extent that might jeopardize future invitations. A positive reading of such an approach would point out that Lovins was just being realistic. If he hoped to have any influence at all in the future he needed to confine his present advice to an areas situated well within the president’s comfort zone. A less charitable interpretation would assume that what mattered to Lovins was the thrill of access to such an august portal of power. Never receiving such an invitation, I had a lesser experience,...

Summary The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF), founded on September 12, 1985 – today 28 years ago – is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 2013 and so are three TFF Associates: • Richard Falk, professor in international law at Santa Barbara and Princeton, the UN S-G’s envoy for the Occupied Territories;• David Krieger, founder (1982) and president of The Nuclear Age Foundation devoted to nuclear abolition;• Jan Oberg, co-founder and director of TFF. Background World renown expert on the Nobel Peace Prize, Norwegian lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl*, says: – Nobel dedicated his prize to “the “champions of peace” (not to “peace” in general). Not that many of those we know from open sources are nominated this year are qualified, but a select few are eligible, like the American Professor Richard Falk, Norwegian Ambassador Gunnar Garbo, American David Krieger of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the former Director...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Fifty years ago Martin Luther King made his earth-shattering “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Is there anybody who watches and listens to it on YouTube not moved to the soles of their shoes? I’ve heard it a hundred times and still it stirs me. His dream that one day his children would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” is one of the greatest lines in all oratory. The south of the US, he said, was “sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression”. Within ten years of the end of America’s civil war, fought over the issue of slavery, southern white Democrats had established state constitutions that stripped black citizens of their newly won political rights. Terrorist groups like the Klu Klux Klan destroyed black...

billion – in a world where the UN for all its activities has a budget of about 30, development aid stands on 160 and peace-building about 0,5 billion – all according to the latest report by the U.N. Secretary General. Indeed, therefore, the problem Mr. Nobel intended to combat is many times bigger and more threatening to humankind than he could ever foresee. To award the European Union the prize is to poke fun of Alfred Nobel’s intentions

Both, of course. Well deserved for EU’s past and for relations within, in the tradition of West rewarding West. But critics are right about relations without and the present; like debt bondage of GIPSI–Greece-Italy-Portugal-Spain-Ireland/EU periphery–to Germany. But first, the arguments in favor. Two French politicians, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, declared that Germany had been so atrocious that it had to become member of the family, and then created the family: Genius, peace genius. On 1 Jan, 1958 the European Community embodied the Treaty of Rome, which was signed in 1957 by a horde of men. It certainly fulfilled Nobel’s testament for reducing standing armies against each other and increasing understanding. The prize did not live up to the condition of the preceding year though. But events need some time to prove themselves, like Obama’s rhetoric – and, more importantly: a major omission; but better late than never.

By Gunnar Westberg The Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union The Norwegian Nobel Prize committee has again decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize award to a recipient with the intention to encourage the awardee to work for peace, rather than to reward an accomplishment.  The founders of the European Union saw it as a peace organization, but since then very little has been done to promote peace or to achieve disarmament. Most important, the EU has not at all worked to diminish the greatest threat to mankind, nuclear war. Two of the dominant members of the EU are nuclear weapon states, and have shown no intention to work to prevent a nuclear Armageddon. The EU has rather discouraged work by its member states against nuclear weapons. The two European countries who have been most active for nuclear abolition, Switzerland and Norway, are not members of the EU. The Nobel...

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Why? The EU is credited with making making peace in the Balkans while it made war in Bosnia unavoidable by prematurely recognizing Slovenia and Croatia out of old Yugoslavia. After that Bosnia could neither sit in Rest-Yugoslavia nor become independent without war. EU countries are constantly involved in wars and interventions (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria). Two are nuclear weapons powers. The EU Treaty advocates

/10/janoberg.jpg”> A man shall be judged more by his deeds than by his words, says President Obama. That is what I do to him here. On the basis of what he has done and says he will do. This is President Obama’s most nasty, bellicose, one-sided and perversely power-arrogant speech ever. The Nobel Committee ought to revoke its Prize to him, but of course it won’t. This cynical man speaks about the goodness of even more “crippling” sanctions on a country of 75 million people of which 25 % are children under 14. At every single aspect he touches upon, he takes the wrong path: towards making war irreversible. There is no excuse that it was for AIPAC. In contrast to George W. Bush, he is neither ignorant, under-educated, or un-intelligent. That’s what makes it so serious, so tragic. Among several remarkable things is that the President here also gives...

By Biljana Vankovska There is something very bizarre and alike in the selection of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winners and the Time’s person of the year. Coincidence (or rather not), the three Nobel laureates (two of them from Liberia and one from Yemen) and the Protester are all female and pictured as “ordinary” activists, i.e. actresses in the developments that marked 2011.

By Jan Oberg Congratulations to the three staunch women! And then there is the positive and the negative. Positive: Women, non-violence, Africa and that the prize was not once again given to war-makers and -criminals. Also, that it was not – as rumoured – awarded the EU. Negative: Focus on human rights rather than anti-militarism as embedded in Nobel’s will, two of the women have very strong ties to the United States and are already pelted with awards, there and elsewhere; once again mainly to a politician (who by the way has invited the U.S. to establish its African Military Command in her country) rather than to researchers or people who have had the civil courage to criticise the United States and/or the West in general.It seems unbelievable to me that they have – this very year – avoided Tunisia and Egypt as well as (once again) people like Daniel...