Wednesday, October 16, 2002
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Wednesday, October 16, 2002 |
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Maybe Carter should reconsider this 'prize' By MONROE ROARK For many of former president Jimmy Carter's supporters, the news was long overdue. Carter has been announced as the winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Though Carter himself would never touch the subject in the past, many of his friends have been campaigning for a decade or more on his behalf, citing his humanitarian work around the world as well as at home since he left office more than 20 years ago. It's rather ironic, after all this time, that the Nobel Prize committee chooses the year Carter reinforces his "I never met a dictator I didn't like" status, cozying up to Fidel Castro, a man whose name is long synonymous with repression. But maybe it's not an accident. More to the point, this is not about Carter at all, but rather the Nobel Peace Prize itself. If he takes a look at its recent history, perhaps Carter will wonder whether he even wants the award. The chairman of the Nobel Prize committee, in an unprecedented move, took advantage of the Carter announcement to trash President Bush and his current foreign policy. 0ne is left to wonder how Carter's own stance on Iraq figured into his win, and how the committee might have been thrilled to seize upon it this year. Going back a decade, a case has been made several times for Carter winning this award. In 1994, he did a considerable amount of work in Haiti, and was universally praised for it. But the Nobel Prize committee lost what was left of its credibility that year by giving one-third of the Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat (shared with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres). One Nobel official in Norway quit in protest after that announcement. There's really no need to make a case here about Arafat. Anyone who follows world events even peripherally knows how ridiculous that was. But that probably shouldn't have been a surprise, either, given what happened a few years before that. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm still waiting to hear why. Alfred Nobel laid out the qualifications for the prize in his will, written in 1895. It is for " ... the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." How did Gorbachev perform in relation to those qualifications? Out of five years as head of the Soviet Union, he instituted economic 'reforms' during the last three years, and the income of Soviet citizens fell during that time, while Chinese income was going up. While pulling armies out of Afghanistan, Cambodia and Angola, he continued to support puppet regimes in those countries, while supplying arms to North Korea and Libya, as well as countries in Central America, by way of Cuba. In response to democratically favorable events in Eastern Europe (remember, this was when the Berlin Wall fell), he reacted in such a way that many people actually believed he inspired these events, when they were really the last thing he wanted. He reacted to similar events in the Baltic states with anger and, sometimes, violence. He remained, until the end, a Communist. He would have never advanced to such a powerful position if he had not been a Communist. Every move he made, economic and otherwise, was an attempt to save Communism, not abandon it. So, as this 70-year campaign of oppression and economic suicide ended, the Nobel Peace Prize was given to the man who tried to keep it going. In light of that, Arafat's award should not have been too much of a surprise. After all, if they wanted to recognize the man most responsible for the downfall of Communism, the committee would have had to grit its teeth and hand the Nobel Peace Prize over to Ronald Reagan. I don't see that ever happening. Whether Jimmy Carter deserves recognition for his humanitarian work as a former president is really not in question. What Carter needs to consider is whether he wants his name to be associated with the Nobel Peace Prize, which seems to stand for anything but peace. [Monroe Roark's Web address is www.mroark.com.]
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