NOBEL COMMITTEE PUTS BUSH ON NOTICE AS WAR MONSTER:
nytimes.com
REACTION
Nobel Committee Wins Praise and Criticism for Prize to Carter
By ALAN RIDING
ARIS, Oct. 11 — The Norwegian Nobel Committee assured itself extra publicity and sympathetic headlines across Europe today when, in awarding the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter, it suggested that it was also sending a political message criticizing the Bush administration's policy towards Iraq.
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After the award was announced in Oslo this morning, Gunnar Berge, the chairman of the five-member committee, told reporters that it "must also be seen as criticism of the line the current U.S. administration has taken on Iraq."
He added: "I hope it will help strengthen what Carter has to say. He has a more moderate point of view than the sitting administration."
Two other committee members, Inger-Marie Ytterhorn and Hanna Kristine, then challenged this interpretation.
"There is nothing about that in the citation," Ms. Ytterhorn, a former rightist legislator, told an Oslo radio station. Ms. Kristine, another former legislator, told the Norwegian news agency: "In the committee, we didn't discuss what sort of interpretation of the grounds there should be. It wasn't a topic."
However, while the citation focused on Mr. Carter's long commitment to the promotion of human rights, peace and democracy around the world, it clearly made a connection between the award and growing fears of a new war over Iraq.
"In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power," the citation read, "Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development."
Even without Mr. Berge's disputed interpretation of the award, it was apparent that the Nobel Committee knowingly stepped into a hot political issue, and not for the first time.
It deeply angered the Soviet Union in 1975 by awarding the prize to the dissident intellectual Andrei Sakharov, and riled Poland's Communist authorities with a similar award to Lech Walesa in 1983. China was unhappy when the 1989 award went to the Dalai Lama, an implicit criticism of China's occupation of Tibet.
This year, the committee appears to have responded, at least in part, to mounting concern in Europe that the Bush administration is ever more determined to invade Iraq to oust President Saddam Hussein.
Although leading European governments are divided over what to do about Iraq, with Germany refusing to involve itself in any conflict, France still seeking a diplomatic solution and Britain backing the United States, public opinion in all three countries is strongly opposed to a unilateral American attack on Iraq.
In many regions of the world, today's peace prize was also viewed through the prism of Mr. Carter's long years of quiet diplomacy, not only when he helped to seal the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel while president, but also as an indefatigable promoter of democracy and conflict resolution through the Carter Center at Emory University, Atlanta, during the two decades since he left the White House.
In Israel, a senior official in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said: "If only for his efforts to achieve the peace agreement with Egypt, and the fact that this agreement is still holding, he deserves the peace prize. It is still the basic building block for any future peace agreement between Israel and the Arab world."
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, called the award well deserved, "Above all," he added, "Carter is a man who has always stood for dialogue and for solving disputes through diplomacy and peaceful means, and not through the guns of war." He recalled Mr. Carter's work as the head of American teams observing elections among Palestinians in 1996. "People here were impressed with his passion," he said.
Mustafa Khalil, Egypt's prime minister and foreign minister during the Camp David process, said Mr. Carter's award was well deserved. "I think without Mr. Carter, it would have been difficult to reach an agreement between Egypt and Israel. Mr. Carter played one of the most important roles in history in that agreement."
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