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Tiff in peace Nobel panel before awards
Highlights
An unusual war of words is tarnishing the staid Nobel Peace Prize committee just before its main task next week — picking a 2015 winner from candidates such as Pope Francis, Colombian peace negotiators or those helping Syrian refugees. The secretive five-member Norwegian committee is under an unwelcome spotlight after Geir Lundestad, its secretary for 25 years until 2015, questioned the wisdom of some prizes and poked criticism at many members in a book this month.
An unusual war of words is tarnishing the staid Nobel Peace Prize committee just before its main task next week — picking a 2015 winner from candidates such as Pope Francis, Colombian peace negotiators or those helping Syrian refugees. The secretive five-member Norwegian committee is under an unwelcome spotlight after Geir Lundestad, its secretary for 25 years until 2015, questioned the wisdom of some prizes and poked criticism at many members in a book this month.
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Lundestad revealed, for instance, that the 2009 prize to US President Barack Obama had failed to live up to the committee’s hopes, that one member almost quit in disgust at the award to climate campaigner and ex-US vice president Al Gore in 2007, and that one member spoke out against any prize for a pope. In retaliation for the book, Secretary of Peace, the committee issued a rare statement, accusing him of breaking a 50-year confidentiality rule.
And he is being evicted from an office at the Norwegian Nobel Institute where he served as director and attended committee meetings, without a vote. This has touched off the worst row since a pro-Israeli committee member quit in 1994, denouncing the inclusion of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in a joint prize with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for peace efforts.
The book piles pressure on the usually anonymous committee, which tries to cultivate an aura of Olympian detachment in judging world affairs, to pick a worthy winner this year for the eight million Swedish crown ($955,000) prize. Thorbjoern Jagland, an ex-Norwegian prime minister and former committee chair who is still on the committee, hit out at Lundestad’s criticisms. Asle Sveen, a historian of the prize, said: “We have a peace prize next week. The internal strife will soon be forgotten.”
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