Once again, the Nobel Committee has bestowed its peace prize on a recipient who hasn’t really done anything to earn it.
Four years ago, the Nobel Committee gave the prize to Barack Obama, who hadn’t been president for a year. Now it’s given its prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which sounds nice but has few achievements.
What is it with these Norwegians?
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is a UN-backed group assigned to destroy the chemical weapons belonging to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
But the group has barely begun its work — and its ability to locate, let alone destroy, Assad’s chemical weapons is far from assured.
The choice flies in the face of Alfred Nobel’s will, which stipulates the prize he endowed go to someone “who shall have done the most or the best work” in destroying weapons and promoting peace. Even more disappointing is that there were plenty of other candidates who qualified.
Most obvious, of course, was 16-year-old women’s-education activist Malala Yousafzai, who openly defied the Taliban and survived a brutal shooting at the group’s hands. But there’s also Dr. Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist who has braved death threats and an assassination attempt to treat victims of mass rape stemming from the country’s civil war.
Or Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a co-founder of Andrei Sakharov’s Moscow Helsinki Group, who now campaigns against Vladimir Putin’s human-rights abuses. Or the many other courageous people just like these all across the world.
We wish the new Nobel winners every success in their efforts against chemical weapons. But the Nobel Committee would better serve the cause of peace if it honored hard results rather than good intentions.