Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Peace Prize

DOUG MELLGREN, Associated Press Writer Friday, October 11, 2002

(10-11) 04:09 PDT (AP) -- With BC-Nobel-Peace-List, BC-Nobel-Peace-Citation

OSLO, Norway (AP) -- Former President Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights."

The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited Carter's "vital contribution" to the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and his efforts in conflict resolution on several continents and the promotion of human rights after his presidency.

"In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international co-operation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development," the citation said.

The award is worth $1 million.

In a statement posted on the Carter Center's Web site, the 39th president said, "My concept of human rights has grown to include not only the rights to live in peace, but also to adequate health care, shelter, food, and to economic opportunity. I hope this award reflects a universal acceptance and even embrace of this broad-based concept of human rights."

Earlier, he told CNN, "When I was at the White House I was a fairly young man and I realized I would have maybe 25 more years of active life," adding that he decided to "capitalize on the influence I had as the former president of the greatest nation of the world and decided to fill vacuums."

He has said his most significant work has been through the Carter Center, an ambitious, Atlanta-based think tank and activist policy center he and wife Rosalynn founded in 1982 and which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

Perhaps his crowning achievement as president was the peace treaty he negotiated as president between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Premier Menachem Begin. Carter kept them at the Camp David presidential retreat for 13 days in 1978 to reach the accord, and Sadat and Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel committee said Carter, who was in the White House from 1977 to 1981, did not share in the prize because he was not nominated in time.

The secretive, five-member committee made its decision last week after months of secret deliberations as it sought the right message for a world still dazed by the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the war on terrorism that followed and concern about a possible U.S. military strike against Iraq.

Carter, a Democrat and former Georgia governor, rose from life as a small-town peanut farmer to the nation's presidency in 1976 after a campaign that stressed honesty in the wake of the Watergate controversy.

But he returned home after a landslide loss to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, his candidacy undermined by double-digit inflation, an energy crunch that forced Americans to wait in line for gasoline, and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran.

Carter overcame the voter repudiation and has doggedly pursued a role on the world stage as a peacemaker and champion of democracy and human rights.

He helped defuse growing nuclear tensions in Korea, then helped narrowly avert a U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1994, as well as leading conflict mediation and elections monitoring efforts around the world.

"In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international co-operation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development," the citation said.

Last year's award was shared by the United Nations and its secretary-general, Kofi Annan.

The peace prize announcement capped a week of Nobel prizes, with the awards for literature, medicine, physics, chemistry and economics already announced in Sweden's capital, Stockholm.

The Norwegian Nobel committee received a record 156 nominations -- 117 individuals and 39 groups -- by the Feb. 1 deadline. The list remains secret for 50 years, but those who nominate sometimes announce their choice.

Many known nominees, including former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, reflected the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and their aftermath.

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were nominated, but their chances for winning seemed doubtful at a time when they are poised to launch a military strike against Iraq.

"It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken," Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Nobel committee, said. "It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."

The first Nobel Peace Prize, in 1901, honored Jean Henry Dunant, the Swiss founder of the Red Cross.

The prizes were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in his will and always are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of his 1896 death.

This year's Nobels started Monday with the naming of medicine prize winners American H. Robert Horvitz and Britons Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston for groundbreaking research into organ growth and cell death -- work that has opened new avenues for treating cancer, stroke and other diseases.

The physics award went Tuesday to Masatoshi Koshiba, of Japan, and Americans Riccardo Giacconi and Raymond Davis Jr. for using some of the most obscure particles and waves in nature to increase understanding of the universe.

On Wednesday, the economics prize went to Americans Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith for pioneering the use of psychological and experimental economics in decision-making. That same day, American John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka of Japan and Kurt Wuethrich of Switzerland were given the chemistry prize for making two existing lab techniques work for big molecules like proteins.

Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian who survived Auschwitz as a teenager, won the literature prize Thursday for writing that "upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history," the Swedish Academy said.

-- Anonymous, October 11, 2002

Answers

DE GUSTIBUS

Scrap That Silly Award Peace is passé. We need a Nobel Prize in Evil.

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN Friday, October 11, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

It is conceivable that some of us will choke on our cornflakes this morning as we ingest news of the year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a divisive sort of award, more ideologically skewed than any of the others--although the literature prize does, from time to time, excite the tempers in a similar way.

I'm not going to engage in an exercise of empirical criticism, although listing the names of flagrantly undeserving laureates--Kofi Annan, Yasser Arafat, Rigoberta Menchu (the Guatemalan indigenous people's activist), Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, Willy Brandt, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev--can only underscore the harebrained nature of the peace prize.

As of this writing, we do not know who has won this year, and why; and frankly, we should not care. This is a prize whose abolition would greatly enrich mankind. My objection is conceptual and aesthetic. Even if someone of whom we cannot disapprove wins it this year, such as Rudolph Giuliani, I would not budge from my hostility to an award whose category is so flawed as to be meaningless.

The notion of "peace" as an isolated quality is naive, apolitical and un-Hobbesian. (Professors of "peace studies" must be so embarrassed at dinner parties when people ask them what they do for a living; it is so much easier, I think, to be Paul Wolfowitz.) The distinguished Vikings who make the award--their own bellicose history now no more than a folkloric footnote in school textbooks--strain to focus on an elusive worthiness each year.

Sometimes "peace" is treated by the jury as a synonym for saintliness, which might explain why Mother Teresa won in 1979, or the Dalai Lama in 1989 (although, in the latter case, the award also had the welcome effect of doubling as a dollop of wasabi up Red Chinese nostrils). And sometimes "peace" is defined, with head-aching literalness, as a lull in war, which is why those responsible for a lull in Vietnam got themselves a gong.

Broadly, the peace prize goes to people from one of two camps: the idealists and the statesmen/diplomats. My impression is that the award, each year, does no more than turn the anointed idealist into a globe-trotting celebrity (e.g., Ms. Menchu) or the chosen statesman/diplomat into an insufferable egomaniac (e.g., Mr. Kissinger).

Does the peace prize do more? Perhaps it turns the world's gaze, however fleetingly, onto some problem or other, one that might languish unnoticed were it not for the prize. But generally it is no more than a salve for Scandinavian angst; or, to use another metaphor, a milky, decaf barley-brew to make us all feel like global citizens of oh-so-cozy conscience. It's all so mealy-mouthed, so paltry, and so often a substitute for real, red-blooded action, which may, indeed, involve the opposite of peace. I would venture to say that the peace prize is the most hubristic example of the merely gestural act, the most grandiose echo of hollowness in the Western soul.

So may I propose an improvement? A reform of the system? How about scrapping the peace prize forever in favor of an annual citation for peerless evil. Let there be a formal, annual recognition--a naming, each year, in Oslo--of the Nobel Most Evil Award.

Instead of the annual twitterings about peace, this will offer up an alternative gesture that is truly difficult and controversial, one that requires choosing sides and baring moral criteria.

This will not be a joke prize, as the peace prize is; it will be something that Saddam Hussein would get right now, a species of anathema, or international pillory. Apart from being cathartic, a negative award would have a genuine effect on the international order, a real bite in the form of a profound disincentive. Such an award would carry some of the odium of a war-crimes tribunal. No country--or, at least, no civilized country--would allow the winner to visit; and those that do would be tainted. The winner would become a pariah.

Now, that is a deterrent. That kind of award has reason to exist. And it would require some real agonizing over. Imagine the debate: Will it be Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Il? Although the award need not be confined to heads of state or government, it would add to its allure--and its potency--if it were awarded sparingly, not every year as a Pavlovian exercise but only in those years when some truly deserving oppressor is ripe for the stigma.

And needless to say, no cash award would be necessary. No kroners for tyrants.

Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.

-- Anonymous, October 11, 2002

Aren't y'all pissed about this remark?

"It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken," Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Nobel committee, said. "It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."

Give the prize to Carter, fine, but it's not supposed to be a platform for knocking others with different methods of dealing with problems. Has anyone mentioned that we don't have peace in the world, that conditions are worse than they were when Carter was piddling around, that his efforts haven't made one iota of difference? Trying doesn't cut it, succeeding does.

-- Anonymous, October 11, 2002