The announcement of this year\u2019s Nobel Peace Prize winner, set for October 11 [2013], is sure to make big news. The prize remains the most prestigious in the world. But the award has fallen into an evasive pattern, ignoring the USA\u2019s continuous \u201cwar on terror\u201d and even giving it tacit support.<\/p>\n
In his 1895 will, the dynamite inventor and ammunition magnate Alfred Nobel specified that Norway\u2019s parliament should elect a five-member committee for awarding the prize to \u201cchampions of peace.\u201d Yet the list of recent Nobel peace laureates is notably short on such champions. Instead, the erstwhile politicians on the Norwegian Nobel Committee have largely bypassed the original purpose of the prize.<\/p>\n
Despite all its claims of independence, the Oslo-based Nobel Committee is enmeshed in Norwegian politics. The global prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has obscured the reality that its selection committee is chosen by leaders of Norway\u2019s main political parties\u2014and, as a member of NATO, Norway is deeply entangled in the military alliance.<\/p>\n
When the Nobel Peace Prize went to President Obama in 2009, he was in the midst of drastically escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, in tandem with the rest of NATO. The same prize went to the European Union in 2012, a year after many of its member states intervened with military force in Libya. On both occasions, in effect, the Nobel Committee bestowed a \u201cgood war-making seal of approval.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since 2001, the Nobel Peace Prize has been on a prolonged detour around the U.S. government\u2019s far-flung warfare, declining to honor anyone who had challenged any of it anywhere in the world. But the Nobel Committee has done more than just ignore peace activism seeking to stop U.S.-led war efforts. By giving the Peace Prize to Obama and the E.U., the committee has implicitly endorsed those military efforts as part of a rhetorical process that conflates war-making with peace-making. Orwell\u2019s 1984 specter of \u201cWar Is Peace\u201d looms uncomfortably large.<\/p>\n
At times, the Peace Prize has earned goodwill in NGO circles by honoring humanitarian work that is laudable but not directly related to peace. And so far in this century, when the Nobel Committee has focused the prize on human rights, it has danced around Uncle Sam\u2019s global shadow. The Peace Prize has gone only to dissidents in countries where governments are in conflict with Washington\u2014such as Shirin Ebadi of Iran in 2003 and Liu Xiaobo of China in 2010\u2014while failing to honor any of the profuse activism against severe abuses by U.S.-backed governments.<\/p>\n
It was not always this way. During previous decades, the annual announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize might alternately please or enrage the top leaders in the capital of a world power. In 1983, the awarding of the prize to Poland\u2019s Solidarity leader Lech Walesa infuriated the Kremlin. When the 1992 prize went to Rigoberta Menchu, an indigenous foe of U.S.-supported tyrants killing Guatemalan civilians in large numbers, it was a much-needed rebuke to Washington.<\/p>\n
Yes, some Peace Prize choices were dubious or worse. After an Orwellian one, the caustic songwriter Tom Lehrer commented: \u201cPolitical satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.\u201d In an exercise of absurd equivalency, the Nobel Committee had given the 1973 prize to Kissinger and North Vietnam\u2019s negotiator Le Duc Tho.<\/p>\n
The 1980s brought the Peace Prize to brave activists like Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina and Desmond Tutu of South Africa, as well as International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. In 1996, longtime opponents of Indonesia\u2019s U.S.-backed genocidal occupation of East Timor had reason to cheer when the Nobel Peace Prize went to East Timorese heroes Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta. The next year also brought good news when the prize went to Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.<\/p>\n
But in the \u201cwar on terror\u201d world of this century, the Nobel Committee\u2014far from an independent, evenhanded course\u2014has steered the Peace Prize away from terrain where the U.S. government and its allies might appear to be anything other than noble peace-seekers. Relying on such a broken moral compass, the mission to assist \u201cchampions of peace\u201d with the Nobel Peace Prize has lost its way.<\/p>\n
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Norman Solomon is co-founder of\u00a0<\/i>RootsAction.org<\/a> and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy<\/a>. His books include \u201cWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death<\/a>\u201d and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State<\/a><\/i>“.<\/p>\n