BUSH CONSIDERED MONSTER BY NORWEGIANS:
guardian.co.uk
Recognition for the president who never sent a US soldier into war
Bush handed Nobel rebuke as Carter wins the peace prize
Jonathan Steele
Saturday October 12, 2002
The Guardian
Jimmy Carter, the only US president since 1945 never to order American soldiers into combat, yesterday won the Nobel peace prize in what the award committee made clear was a deliberate slap at President George Bush.
"In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, 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," the committee said in its official citation.
The £600,000 prize is the most prestigious international award and has been won by Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Willy Brandt and Burmese human rights campaigner, Aung San Suu Kyi.
The committee has often made politically sensitive choices that have angered governments. The award to the human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov annoyed Soviet leaders in 1975, while the choice of the Dalai Lama in 1989, the year of Tiananmen Square, infuriated China.
Although Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said Mr Bush had called Mr Carter to congratulate him, the award was widely interpreted as an attack on the current president's drive towards war on Iraq. "It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken," the awards committee chairman Gunnar Berge said. "It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."
Nelson Mandela praised Mr Carter for being one of the few US Democrats to criticise the Bush policy. "He deserves the Nobel peace prize. When President Bush has taken that belligerent attitude, Carter has condemned him."
Mr Carter, the 39th president, who served from 1977 to 1981, has spent the last 20 years working in conflict resolution, monitoring foreign elections and running medical and other aid programmes in Africa. With his wife Rosalynn, he founded the Carter Center in Atlanta, in 1982. The prize reflects admiration for his achievements in office and since.
"He symbolises all that is historically thought of as the best in America - America as peacemaker, healer, and champion of human rights, social justice, and democracy, an eradicator of disease and hunger worldwide," Dr Peter Bourne, the British-born doctor who worked on the Carter administration's drug policy, said yesterday.
Mr Carter always prided himself on his record of never sending a US serviceman to death in combat. It was no accident. He was propelled to power in 1976 by the national backlash against the US intervention in Vietnam.
Added to that was revulsion over earlier US efforts at "regime change" in which the CIA aimed to assassinate or mount coups against leaders in the developing world. Several of these plots, in Chile, Congo and Cuba were revealed just as Mr Carter was starting his bid for the presidency.
In office he was determined to stay true to the mood that put him in the White House. He made human rights a top priority, upsetting the traditionalists by insisting the state department draw up an annual country-by-country index of human rights performance. He cancelled weapons systems such as the neutron bomb and the B1 bomber.
He looked for dialogue in place of conflict, most notably in the Middle East where he should have won the Nobel prize along with Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, and Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister. The Nobel committee said yesterday his office sent in the nomination too late.
If there was a cancer in his presidency, it was Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man he appointed to be his national security adviser. Mr Brzezinski had befriended Mr Carter as a young governor and helped to put him on the council on foreign relations, giving him his first chance to sit with professionals. Mr Carter never felt able to dump him, even though his hawkish instincts were alien to his own. Rivalry between Mr Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state, who eventually resigned, undermined Mr Carter's detente with the Soviet Union, aborted his peace efforts with Cuba, and led to foolish US moves in the Horn of Africa and Zaire.
Mr Brzezinski's influence also led to the disastrous decision to try to rescue the 52 US diplomats held hostage in the embassy in Tehran. Operation Eagle Claw was the only aggressive move in the Carter presi dency. Eight airmen died when a helicopter and a plane collided in the desert.
Mr Carter's aversion to the US military-industrial complex was furiously opposed by US elites. Men in power today, such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, worked hard to get the rightwinger Ronald Reagan elected in his place. They distorted Mr Carter's moves, pilloried him for "weakness" and sought - successfully - to have US opposition to new wars branded a disease (the "Vietnam syndrome") instead of a sensible reaction against imperial intervention.
Out of office, Mr Carter became America's most successful ex-president. One commentator quipped that he "used the presidency as a stepping-stone to what he really wanted to do in life". There was truth in it, as he embarked on 20 years of work in conflict resolution in Nicaragua, Haiti, North Korea, and Cuba, as well as funding programmes against disease in Africa. He became America's Nelson Mandela, except that he is still unrecognised by many of his countrymen. Yesterday's award may give him the belated recognition he deserves.
In a statement posted on the Carter Center's website, he said: "My concept of human rights has grown to include not only the rights to live in peace, but also to adequate healthcare, shelter, food, and to economic opportunity. I hope this award reflects a universal acceptance and even embrace of this broad-based concept."
He said yesterday: "When I left the White House I was fairly young and I realised I might have 25 more years of active life," he said. "So we capitalised on the influence that I had as a former president of the greatest nation in the world and decided to fill vacuums."
Choice made in secret and by Norwegians only
· Five men and women choose the peace laureate in secret. No minutes of their meetings are revealed and all decisions are presented as being unanimous, even if they are not.
· Committee members (who are always Norwegian) are appointed by Norway's parliament for six-year terms. Alfred Nobel was a Swede, but decided that Norwegians should decide who had "done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".
· The committee members who chose Jimmy Carter were Gunnar Berge, 62, a former MP and finance minister; Johan Gunnar Stalsett, 67, a bishop; Hanna Kristine Kvanmo, 78, a former MP and UN delegate; Sissel Marie Ronbeck, 52, ia former MP and minister; and Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, 61, a former MP and adviser to the far-right Progress party.
· To nominate someone for the prize you have to be an MP/minister, a member of an international law court, a university chancellor (or professor of social science, history, philosophy, law and theology), the head of a peace/foreign affairs thinktank, a former laureate, a member of a body which has won the prize in the past or a current or former Nobel committee member.
· This year Mr Carter beat off competition from 117 individuals and 39 groups, including the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, President George Bush, Tony Blair and the Irish musician Bono. |
