By Anna Varfolomeeva
BEIJING— (October 13 —M4relay) – As time passes by, the Nobel committee appears to be drifting further and further away from the main idea behind the Prize. Both the 2009 and 2010 awards to US President Barack Obama and a so-called Chinese “human rights activist” might just illustrate this observation s – though in some instances it may depend on whose fence you are sitting. Many tongues have wagged, questions raised, and doubts growing as to the real motives for the award.
“When Nobel called upon the parliament of Norway to give his prize to ‘champions of peace’ he had in mind those who work for a fundamental change of the world where nations could safely abolish national military forces,” said Fredrik Heffermehl, a Norwegian lawyer, the author of the book Nobel’s Will. “Over half of the awards since 1946 have not conformed with the intention of Nobel, who wished to change the international system in order to end wars and armaments,” he said.
Almost all of the decisions by the Committee in recent years signify that its members are engaged in the interpretation of Nobel’s ideas, but not following his will. These interpretations are very ambiguous, and often very shady. It is enough to mention the winners of the last five years: Mohammed al-Baradei, Muhammad Yunus, Al Gore, Martti Ahtisaari, Barack Obama and In spite of active work, none of them had any truly outstanding achievements, according to a Russian New Politics magazine report. We could argue about the reasons, “but the fact is that there is no other international organization that would take more politicized, one-sided and subjective decisions than this one,” Oleg Cherkovets wrote in his article Chinese Sakharovs won’t help Washington. Except for, maybe, NATO, the organization Norway is a member of from the first day of its foundation, along with Washington and Brussels.
“It is not surprising that in recent decades the Nobel Peace Prize has become an “American way Peace Prize” and it goes to the politicians and public figures who made the greatest contribution to the attempt to establish ‘the right’ model of world order,” Cherkovets wrote. One can not say that the Nobel Prizes in all the other categories are free of subjectivity and political bias. It is just much harder to do this in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine, but not in literature, for example. One can recall the rewarding of Soviet dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970 and Iosif Brodsky in 1987. It’s interesting that after Solzhenitsyn’s arrest in 1974 and his deportation to West Germany, it was the U.S. military attaché William Odom who managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn’s archive, including the author’s membership card for the Writers’ Union and Second World War military citations.
According to Cherkovets, “the Norwegian Nobel Committee has turned into another instrument of Washington and its closest allies on the international arena in spite of the direct will of a Nobel.”
During the period of the most intense resistance between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, Andrei Sakharov, an eminent Soviet nuclear physicist, a Soviet dissident and human rights activist, was announced to be the winner of the Peace Prize. Not the Prize in Physics, but the Peace Prize.
“Sakharov got the Peace Prize for his activities on the Soviet Union destruction, and for the attempt to destroy the world socialism, to the point of the monstrous calls for a nuclear war against communism,” Cherkovets added.
Sakharov’s attempt were continued and brought to their goal by another Nobel Peace Prize winner – Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1990, the Norwegian Committee praised his efforts to defeat socialism in Eastern Europe. And shortly the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
“And now it seems that the Norwegian “peace activists” got a direct order to shoot China using “the Nobel guns”. They are trying to play the dissident card – to bring up “Chinese Sakharov” who is languishing in Communist prison… But they have not taken into account the fact that the Chinese leadership learned the tragic lessons of the Soviet Union. As Chinese President Hu Jintao said a few years ago, they will not allow “Chinese Gorbachev” to appear,” Cherkovets intimated.