Brad Norington, Washington correspondent | October 13, 2009
Article from: The Australian
THE Nobel Peace Prize was discredited if Barack Obama could be nominated for the award after just 11 days in office and win it nine months later, former foreign minister Alexander Downer said yesterday.
Mr Downer called the US President’s surprise win a farce, saying it was a pity Mr Obama had not refused the award.
He singled out Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai as a worthy alternative who had been ignored after years of struggling for human rights.
“The peace prize has to be for actual achievement – not potential – and it has to be achievement in promoting world peace, not raising the prestige of the American state, which is largely what Barack Obama has done so far,” Mr Downer told the ABC.
Mr Obama had been in office for just 11 days when nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize closed on February 1. He spent most of those first days settling into the White House.
Although humbly questioning whether he was deserving, he described the prize as a “call to action”.
The award’s founder, Alfred Nobel, decreed the annual prize was to be bestowed for achievements “during the preceding year”. According to his will, the winner “shall have done the most, or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.
The Norwegian judges took an alternative approach, handing the prize to Mr Obama for future works. Thorbjorn Jagland, the committee’s chairman, defended the award in the face of public outcry, saying: “It was because we would like to support what he is trying to achieve.”
It took two other former US presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, a combined total of 12 years before they were given the award.
Roosevelt had been president for five years when the Nobel committee gave him the honour in 1906 for mediating a peace treaty that ended war between Russia and Japan. He declined to personally accept the award until years after he had left office.
Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 – seven years after he became president – for creating the League of Nations in the wake of World War I. Wilson’s drive in bringing the US into the war was critical to its end, and he took the leading role afterwards in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
When Mr Obama was nominated for the peace prize in February, he was still five months away from delivering his Cairo speech that called for a new beginning in relations between the US and Muslim world.
It was eight months before his UN speech in New York last month in which he pledged that the US would re-engage with the world after the isolation of the Bush administration.
Mr Obama has also launched a policy initiative to reduce nuclear weapons, sought to restart the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and declared he was open to renewed diplomacy with North Korea and Iran.
But most commentators said the challenges lay ahead of the President, not behind him, and pointed out he was still fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the first 11 days after January 20, Mr Obama appointed Richard Holbrooke as his envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and George Mitchell as his envoy to the Middle East. His other notable moves attracting international attention were pledges to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and ban torture.
Mr Obama’s Nobel win came as a surprise to him when he was awoken with the news by his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, at 6am last Friday (9pm AEST).
But on February 27, he was reported as a nominee, along with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who intervened after conflicts in Georgia and Gaza.
Under the Nobel process, nominations are not released for 50 years and the judging process remains secret.
It is not known who nominated Mr Obama. Under the rules, names can be submitted only by members of governments and national assemblies, international courts, academics, past winners and former advisers appointed by the Norwegian institute. Invitations for nominations are sent out each September, and the deadline is February. A shortlist is sent to a panel of permanent advisers, and then sent back for a majority vote by the five-person peace prize committee in early October.
The decision is final, with no appeal.American imperialism
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