Many Nobel peace prizes betray founder’s aims: book

Guardians of the Nobel Peace Prize have betrayed the original aim of rewarding ‘champions of peace’ by picking laureates such as the Red Cross or the US president, Barack Obama, according to a book seen by Reuters on Friday.

‘The Nobel Peace Prize, What Nobel Really Wanted’, contains hitherto unpublished diaries by a late committee chairman showing fierce disputes in past decades over how to interpret the 1895 will of the award’s founder, Sweden’s Alfred Nobel.

The committee is ignoring Nobel and making a peace prize according to their own ideas. It’s a moral failure,’ author and lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl told Reuters of the English-language book which expands on one in Norwegian in 2008.

Guardians of the prize have in the past rejected Heffermehl’s interpretation of Nobel’s intent, and criticism of many prizes since the 1950s, as speculative.

Heffermehl said that Nobel, a philanthropist and the inventor of dynamite, wanted to reward ‘champions of peace’, with more stress on demilitarisation and peace congresses than given by the Nobel committee in recent decades.

He said Obama, who won in 2009, should not be on the list — despite his goal of nuclear disarmament — partly because of US involvement in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Disputes outlined in diaries by Gunnar Jahn, head of the five-member committee from 1942-66, showed a deep awareness of problems in correctly interpreting Nobel’s will, Heffermehl said.

Jahn once threatened to quit because he felt too many awards were going to institutions, such as the Red Cross.

‘If we continue to give the prize to institutions I shall have to ask (parliament) to free me from the task as member of the committee,’ he wrote in 1963. ‘We really cannot constantly give the prize to those who have healed the wounds of war.’

In the end, he approved the 1963 award to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had also won in 1944 and 1917.

In 1958, Jahn said he was ‘rather aghast that several of the committee members were fixed on Helen Keller as their candidate.’ Keller, a deaf-blind author and political activist who died in 1968, never won the prize.

Over the years, however, Jahn went along with some choices criticised by Heffermehl, such as an award to the UN children’s fund UNICEF in 1965.

A key problem is that Nobel’s will is vague.

The official translation says the prize should go to ‘the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.’

Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute, has said that Heffermehl exaggerates Nobel’s faith in peace congresses that were more popular 100 years ago — Nobel once said his dynamite factories could end war faster than such meetings.

Peace has had wide interpretations in recent years, with Nobel prizes going to Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai in 2004 and Bangladeshi banker Mohammad Yunus in 2006.

Mairead Maguire, who shared the 1976 prize for peace efforts in Northern Ireland, called Heffermehl’s book ‘an imperative read for those concerned about the integrity’ of the prize.