The Chinese have charged the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo, with the “Crime of Instigating the Subversion of State Power” (The Hindu, 10 December 2010) which is somewhat similar to the charge of sedition brought against Arundhati Roy. If India was taking a principled stand of supporting the human right to free speech by attending the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, the same principles should lead to quashing the first information report filed against her and several others. If Liu Xiaobo deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, so does Arundhati Roy in full measure, for both have stood up fearlessly against authoritarian state structures and on behalf of the common man and his freedoms. And Julian Assange deserves the prize even more, as the Russians have suggested, for fearlessly exposing the way the United States controls its global empire.
Of course, Liu Xiaobo should be released from jail immediately. There can be no compromise on that issue. Nor should Assange be subjected to attacks on his life and reputation for what he has done on behalf of all humanity. But restoring the full human rights of these individuals and even congratulating them for their actions perhaps do not add up to their deserving the Nobel Peace Prize, the highest award for “championing” the cause of peace, which is exactly what the late Alfred Nobel had in mind when he instituted the award (Heffermehl 2010: 37-38). Curious List We have all seen how in the last few decades, the Norwegian committee that selects the winners has consistently given the prize to politicians who have brokered temporary cessation of hostilities. The names that come to mind almost immediately are those of Menachem Begin of Israel coupled with that Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt for the 1978 award, and those of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin again
coupled with that of Yasser Arafat for the 1994 award. By no stretch of a kindly imagination can these warlords be called champions of peace. But the inappropriateness pales into insignificance compared to presentation of the award to Henry Kissinger, the coldest of American hawks in the cold war period. It would be simplistic on our part to dismiss all this as an aberration. Five years after the award started in 1901, the world was stunned when the prize went to Theodore Roosevelt, president of the us, who had a few years ago personally led a cavalry charge in Cuba. He had merely brokered an uneasy settlement between Russia and Japan, which has left the Kuril Islands as contested territory right down to this date. Even the New York Times said the award had gone “to the most warlike citizen of these States” (Abrams 1988: 58). A cursory glance at other warlike statesman winners shows us that Viking blood speaks to the Norwegian committee – Austen Chamberlain (1925), Frank Kellogg (1929), and Cordell Hull (1945). An even more telling indictment is made by the curious omission of Mahatma Gandhi from the lists, though he was nominated several times. Jacob Worm-Müller gave negative advice for the 1937 nomination while acknowledging that Gandhi was “deservedly honoured and loved by the masses of India”. He spoke against him for being “a freedom fighter and a dictator, an idealist and a nationalist” (Tonnesson 1999). He did not think Gandhij was “consistently pacifist” nor was he sure that his ideals were “universal”.
Having put the Mahatma in his place, the committee went on to give the prize to none other than Robert Cecil. Christian Lange eulogised Cecil in the presentation speech in the following terms: Think of his background and traditions! The Cecil family is one of the oldest and most distinguished among the English landed aristocracy. His father, the Marquess of Salisbury, was for nearly twenty years the leader of the Conservative Party, and for most of this time prime minister. In foreign affairs he accepted the legacy of Disraeli and continued Britain’s imperialist policy. In his early twenties the young Lord Robert Cecil became a private secretary to his father, at that time prime minister and foreign secretary. He fully shared his father’s pothat, either in Hatfield or in the circles in which Lord Robert moved in London, pacifism should at any time have been discussed, except perhaps with a shrug of the shoulders, for serious, realistic men cannot afford the luxury of such childish dreams! (Presentation Speech, 10 December 1937, www.nobelprize.org). The award was given to one of the aristocratic founders of the failed League of Nations when it was clear to everyone that his and their bankrupt policies had led to the rise of fascism and brought the world to the eve of another devastating war.
Alfred Nobel died in 1896, at a time when Norway would be freed from being a part of the Swedish empire. While he did not elaborate on his reasons, it can be conjectured that he was moved by a kindly feeling of solidarity with Norwegians when he requested the newly formed Norwegian Storting or parliament to select the committee which would award the peace prize. Most times, this small committee of Norwegian politicians has done a worthwhile job, but their inevitably restricted world view has led to ghastly mistakes. In 1974, Berit Ås of the socialist party advised his Norwegian colleagues that the committee should include others, so that the world could be represented “ideologically, culturally and geographically” (Tonnesson 2000). Selective Awards However, the Norwegian committee has continued to stick to its chosen path, consciously divergent from the wishes of Alfred Nobel, but focused on promoting western values – even North Atlantic ones – and admonishing those states or cultures that posed a challenge to this world view. Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-Bomb, was given the prize in 1975 after the publication of his famous Manifesto, and his founding of the committee for human rights in Russia. A clear threat to the authoritarian leaders of the Soviet Union, he was prevented from attending the ceremony, as Lui has been prevented this year. Mikhail Gorbachev was similarly discovered by the committee in 1990 as the Soviet Union crumbled away. Now that the west has discovered an Islamic threat to its existence, the committee quickly came up with an award for the Iranian woman lawyer, Shirin Ebadi in 2003. As China poses an economic challenge to the us, it is the turn of a Chinese dissident to be similarly embraced. The point is not that the laureates are not all admirable in their own way. What is under serious consideration is the motivation of the Nobel Peace Committee members and what they intend to achieve by distributing the awards. Their most famous dissident was Carl von Ossietzky, a German prisoner of conscience imprisoned by the Nazis. He was prevented from receiving the prize in 1935 and died three years later while still in jail of TB and ill-treatment. The committee was keenly aware of the threat posed to Europe and peace by the rise of Nazism amongst their midst. They were right to honour Ossietzky.
Perhaps, this experience has continued to inform their decisions down the years, the Norwegians being stuck in a time warp of fear, no longer able to detect the threats posed to freedom by the imperial capitalism of the US, or to appreciate the different paths to development taken by other cultures. No other explanation can make sense of their refusing to recognise Noam Chomsky, an ardent opponent of war, and the imperial designs of the US ever since the Vietnam War. Even more baffling is their inability to recognise the tremendous contributions to peace theory and peace activism made by their own Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, a trenchant critic of the west, widely recognised as the father of peace studies. And why on earth would they rush to give the prize to Barack Obama before he had time to achieve anything? They were applauding only western liberalism’s ability to elect a black president of the us. The subtext of the award would read that they never thought Obama capable of achieving anything in the future.
The Norwegian journalist, Hege Ulstein, sees the prize “rooted in the western hemisphere, based on a world view about to become obsolete”. She says that the leader of the committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, wanted to give the prize to a Chinese this year. “Fair enough, but why Liu?” she adds. “He criticises Chinese culture. He wants a westernised China…Liu was chosen because he became a symbol after his arrest.” In her verdict she condemns the committee as paternalistic blinkered politicians, “stricken in years” (Dagsavisen, 11 December 2010). The memory of Alfred Nobel requires a better informed committee to carry out his wishes for recognising true “champions of peace”.
courtesy:epw
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