Abiy Ahmed, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, is underway to cast Ethiopia into civil war. It is not the first time that Nobel Peace Prize laureates leave the ceremony in the winter brisk Norwegian capital of Oslo, and instead of building peace increase violent conflicts. Other recipients were already in full swing on the battlefield at the time of their announcements.

 War and peace occasionally—according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee—walk hand in hand.

By Klas Lundström

 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE/ANALYSIS “The Promised Land.” That is the title of former U.S. President Barack Obama’s newly published memoirs. A lucrative book contract, a life in the house of world power, a review of Obama’s path to power through asphalt-scented social commitment in Chicago. Perhaps even an occasional anecdote about what it was like to grow up in Indonesia during the dawn of the Suharto dictatorship in the mid-1960s.

However, anyone who plans to buy a copy of the ex-President’s memoirs should not expect to read any explanations for Obama’s systematic and deadly use of drones in the United States’ “war on terror,” John Pilger wrote on Twitter.

The Australian journalist’s tweet, in times of an escalating conflict and the accompanying refugee crisis in Ethiopia and the ongoing human rights tragedy in Myanmar, points to a larger context: warmongering Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

From Ethiopia—

In 2019, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighboring Eritrea.”

The peace prize’s immediate glow and political recognition improved Abiy Ahmed’s mobility at home, in a time of unprecedented political reforms in Ethiopia. Six months prior to his journey to Oslo, and the award ceremony in the spirit of the Swedish dynamite producer Alfred Nobel, political commentators sensed major shortcomings in Prime Minister Ahmed’s initiated reform process—and dubbed it a “prayer for instability.” And ethnic tensions have erupted like the Jack’s from their boxes, and the current conflict in the Tigray region has in a short time tossed Ethiopia to the brink of civil war.

A war and a human rights conflict billboarded by the face of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Abiy Ahmed.

—To Myanmar—

Another political potentate who—in an even more Shakespearean way—has had her polished peace medal stained with blood is Myanmar’s State Counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three years into her unlawful house arrest. Then, she enjoyed the support of the global opinion in her push for democratization of the Southeast Asian military dictatorship. Described as “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless,” Aung San Suu Kyi remained an almost canonized political figure until 2010, when, after 15 years of more-or-less sustained house arrest, she once again became part of Myanmar’s real-political reality.

In the 2015 general elections, her National League for Democracy won a landslide victory and since 2016, Suu Kyi has been on the other side of Myanmar’s wall of political power. A time—serving as Myanmar’s “de facto” President (something she can never officially be, given that her children uphold British citizenship)—marred by controversy, imprisoned journalists and Suu Kyi’s widely criticized treatment of the Muslim and stateless Rohingya people; classified by the United Nations as one of the world’s most persecuted ethnic minorities.

Myanmar’s refugee crisis between the autumn of 2017 and the spring of 2018 forced some 700,000 Rohingya to flee their homes in in a wave of “ethnic cleansing.” In late 2019, however, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi defended Myanmar’s treatment of the stateless people before the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Allegations not only echoed by the United Nations, but also by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, were labelled by Suu Kyi as “incomplete and misleading.”

The political west’s bewilderment at the political transmutation of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate is largely based on self-sketched notions of who Aung San Suu Kyi really is, argues Peter Popham, journalist and author of two biographies of Myanmar’s current State Counsellor. The fact that she dismissed several prominent Muslim candidates prior to the 2015 election was clear indication of what’s to come, he adds.

“I don’t think she is xenophobic but perhaps because of the overwhelming current of opinion within Myanmar, which is very hostile to Islam, she has just gone along with it,” Peter Popham told The Guardian.

—Via American Republicans and Democrats

Whether or not Aung San Suu Kyi’s political metamorphosis took place successively or not, the Norwegian Nobel Committee could not have had any illusions about the recipient of the peace prize award in 1973.

Henry Kissinger—then-Secretary of State in Richard Nixon’s Republican government—accepted the award along with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, for their accomplished ceasefire during the Vietnam War. The choice of Kissinger caused an instant controversy; Le Duc Tho refused the award, and two members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee resigned in protest to the choice of recipient.

The ceasefire which the 1973 motivation was based on was the aftermath of the United States’ bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. The bombing campaign, launched at Christmas in 1972 and which Sweden’s then-Prime Minister Olof Palme dubbed “an atrocity” and “a kind of torture,” claimed the lives of some 1,600 civilians—and only three months prior to Kissinger’s medal acceptance in Oslo, the democratically elected president Salvador Allende had been overthrown and killed in Chile, with direct “help” from the Nixon administration.

Henry Kissinger is viewed as one of the most controversial Nobel Peace Prize laureates of all time; chiefly as the then-Secretary of State continued to cheer on U.S.A.’s anti-Communist crusade around the world. Kissinger and the U.S. actively supported the Indonesian invasion and genocide in East Timor in 1975, while actively assisting brutal military dictatorships in Argentina, Paraguay, and Indonesia.

In Indonesia did another American politician spend a few years during his childhood. But when Barack Obama, as freshman year President, received the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, more than a few eyebrows were raised over the fact that he could hardly have managed to carry out any lasting peace brokerage before celebrating his first year in the White House.

“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed the prize was a mistake,” said Brian Becker, national coordinator of the Act Now To Stop War and End Racism, in a Reuters report at the time. Giving Obama the award on the grounds that “you are not George W. Bush” did not have achieve “what it had hoped for,” Becker added.

A Peace Prize Laureate and His Drones

Not only the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, however, invested a lot of faith in Barack Obama’s political emergence and subsequent entry into the White House. His hopeful “Yes We Can” campaign and promises of changes were nothing but a stark contrast to his successor George W. Bush’s confrontational two terms in office.

Although Obama signed an executive order banning all so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”—which constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment—on his second day in office while championing progressive reforms for LGBTQ people, his administration never turned out to be the outlined liquidator of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror,” but merely its successor. Although Obama’s eight years in office was never associated with direct interventions—as in Afghanistan, in 2002—or occupations—as in Iraq, in 2003—of sovereign states, the administration actively contributed to illegal regime change in Honduras, in 2009.

But it was in the widespread usage of drones that has become the symbol of Barack Obama’s foreign policy; a way of conducting “war on terror” that the then-President himself believed the C.I.A. and the Pentagon had gotten “too comfortable with the technology as a tool to fight terrorism.” Especially in the Middle East.

In its investigation series “The Drone Papers,” The Intercept reveals how civilians became victims to the U.S. drone attacks, approved on vague grounds during Obama’s time in the White House. In Yemen and Pakistan alone, human rights fund Reprieve estimates that 1,147 unknown deaths have been claimed as a result of the U.S. drone strikes. The United States’ actions in its “war on terror” and strengthened “Big Brother Society” in the wake of the September 11 attacks, in 2001, and the implementation of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, would have remained unknown facts, had not whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Wikileaks stepped up and notified the public about the cruel world of Western counterterrorism practice.

“A Prize Cut Away From Its Roots”

Abiy Ahmed, Aung San Suu Kyi, Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama; all examples of the exceptions that confirm a rule? Not necessarily, according to Richard Evans, a British historian focusing on World War II.

The dynamite inventor and arms dealer Alfred Nobel’s fondness for pacifism and the pursuit of world peace was a latter-day awakening and, in part, the result of the Swede’s friendship with Bertha von Suttner, an Austrian peace activist and author of the book “Lay Down Your Weapons.” Suttner’s correspondence with Alfred Nobel, where she criticized his dynamite production and arms profits, made a profound impression on him, and in 1905—nine years after Alfred Nobel’s death—the Austrian, herself, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The roots of the prize in the recognition of the recipient’s strive for global peace have throughout the years been uprooted and replaced by mere seeds of stated good intentions. Therefore—according to Richard Evans—time has come for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to overlook its nomination procedures and review its award criteria.

“Without the transformation of the prize from its original goals of international peacemaking into a general award for the sustaining or campaigning for human rights, Aung San Suu Kyi’s would never have run into so much trouble,” he writes for Foreign Policy. “But then, she would never have been awarded the prize in the first place, either.”