US President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo yesterday. Many people, including Obama himself, were surprised when the Nobel Peace Committee announced the news in October — after all, he had assumed the presidency less than nine months before and had not had sufficient time to do much to deserve the honor.
Obama has been rewarded by the committee for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between the peoples.”
He remains modest, saying that the citation is a spur to encourage him to work harder to be worthy of the award.
Why did Obama win the award? If a European source can be trusted, the key factor was a speech in Prague in April in which he called for nations to scrap nuclear weapons — an eloquent and moving plea that touched the members of the Nobel committee.
However, Obama has no shortage of critics. For example, he was rounded on by human rights advocates when he failed to receive a fellow Nobel Peace laureate, the Dalai Lama, in October, apparently because he did not wish to offend Beijing prior to his trip to China last month.
Since its inception in 1901, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded 90 times to 97 individuals and 23 organizations, such as the International Red Cross, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International and the UN.
Individual recipients of the award include former US president Woodrow Wilson (1919), the founder of the League of Nations; George Marshall (1953), former US secretary of state and author of the “Marshall Plan;” the Dalai Lama (1989); Myanmar pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi (1991); and former African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela and former South African president F.W. De Klerk (joint winners 1993) for reconciliation and peaceful transition of power in South Africa.
Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (1990) received the award for his role in bringing the Cold War to an end, but was criticized by many Russians for his alleged betrayal of the country. Former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin were co-winners in 1978 for negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel, but Sadat was subsequently assassinated by an Egyptian extremist.
Likewise, former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin — who received the award jointly with former Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and former Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat in 1994, for efforts to promote Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation — was killed in 1995 by an Israeli terrorist.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger was a highly questionable winner of the peace award in 1973 after negotiating a Vietnam peace accord. Ironically North Vietnamese co-winner Le Duc Tho knew better and wisely declined the prize — for two years later, Hanoi launched a military offensive that captured South Vietnam.
Many people in South Korea and elsewhere also called into question the award given to former South Korean president Kim Dae-jeung in 2000. He was cited for “peace and reconciliation with North Korea,” after making a trip to Pyongyang for a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Media reports disclosed that Kim paid US$100 million to North Korea for the summit. Worse, Pyongyang has continued to produce and test nuclear weapons.
There is speculation that Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) is interested in the Nobel Peace Prize. His powerful pitch would be peace in the Taiwan Strait. His aim is to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with Taiwan next year. He will then look to establish a cross-strait confidence-building mechanism (CBM), reduce mutual hostility and remove some of the missiles targeting Taiwan. The final step would be to sign a cross-strait “peace agreement” under the one China framework, paving the way for Taiwan and China’s “peaceful development” and eventual unification.
Last month, a delegation of high-ranking retired Chinese Communist Party (CCP), government and military officials, headed by Zheng Bijian (鄭必堅), former vice president of the Central Party School visited Taiwan. Its mission was to hold an “academic” dialogue with their counterparts in Taiwan on the CBM and a peace agreement. Taiwan’s National Security Council is known to have sanctioned and coordinated this so-called “TrackTwo Conference.”
Hu, the CCP general-secretary, will step down from this post at the party’s 18th Congress in 2012. His ambition is to achieve Chinese reunification — something Mao Zedong (毛澤東), Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and Jiang Zemin (江澤民) were unable to do — and strive for the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is doubtful, given China’s poor human rights record and Hu’s history of bloody crackdown in Tibet and Xinjiang, that the Nobel Peace Committee could give the award to a communist dictator. On the other hand, some people believe nothing is impossible. They reason that if China were to pull out some of the missiles targeted at Taiwan, Hu and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) would sign a peace agreement, creating a false image of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, leaving Beijing to use its huge resources to lobby and successfully influence the Nobel Prize Commitee.
Parris Chang is professor emeritus of political science at Pennsylvania State University and president of the Taiwan Institute for Political Economic and Strategic Studies. He is a former National Security Council deputy secretary-general and a former chairman of the legislative defense and foreign relations committees.
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