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President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and its backlash were simultaneous. A newspaper headline alerted me that “Barack Obama wins Nobel; A liability at home.” Indeed, as the right presents an array of weak arguments against Obama’s nomination, the left digs in to its usual position of unthinking defense.
I’d like to suggest some rational common ground. Obama does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. It is not because he is a secret socialist-fascist, Islamic-atheist. It’s because other nominees deserved it more — and Obama doesn’t deserve it yet.
It’s not just my sentiment. The 1983 peace prize winner, Lech Walesa of Poland, asked reporters: “Who, Obama? So fast? Too fast — he hasn’t had the time to do anything yet.” Walesa won the award after organizing worker’s unions in resistance to the Soviets in Poland, an act that got him arrested and imprisoned for 11 months.
British newspaper The Independent ran an article on Nobel’s other candidates for the peace prize in 2009.
Among them was Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist in the Democratic Republic of Congo who was the only doctor treating rape victims in one of the rape capitals of the world. Mukwege’s private clinic was destroyed by arson in the ’90s, so he began working 18-hour days at a hospital where hundreds of thousands of women came for treatment for the most calculated, devastating sexual violence possible. Rape in the Congo is a terrorist tactic. It takes place in front of parents and in front of children, neighbors and friends. Those who stand up for rape victims risk their lives.
Consider another nominee: Sima Simar, an Afghan woman who fled to Pakistan after her husband disappeared under the nation’s Soviet occupation. She opened a clinic for Afghan refugees and then schools for girls, actions that infuriated the Taliban. Despite death threats, she stayed. When the Taliban fell out of power, Simar was named Minister of Women’s Affairs. Even then, after challenging fundamentalist Sharia laws for their health effects on malnourished women, she was forced to resign.
These people have risked their lives to improve the lives of others. President Obama, selected by the Nobel committee for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” has risked his re-election and the wrath of political comedian Glenn Beck.
Risk, of course, is not a requirement for spreading peace. Obama’s creation of “a new climate in international politics” is a crucial first step to progress. A new climate for dialogue does not comfort women who have been gang raped for political ends. It does not build schools for Afghan girls.
Obama has planted a seed of hope for a new era of international cooperation. That effort has yet to bear fruit. It has yet to save or change a single life. It has yet to bring home a single soldier or stop a single bomb in Iraq or Afghanistan. It has not delivered democracy to Iran.
It might accomplish all of these things. In fact, I suspect it will. But it hasn’t happened yet. Until he does, we can only credit him with articulating his challenges.
These other nominees – just two of the 205 – have changed the world by touching it, by taking action and sacrificing their lives to make the world better, one person at a time. They haven’t changed the climate. They’ve built shelter from its harshest conditions.
If Barack Obama can stop this deluge, give him a prize. Until then, we should reserve our highest praises for those who have achieved tangible peace in smaller ways.
Eryk Salvaggio accepted the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature.
