The Nobel Peace Prize has long been contentious, beginning with its origins in the will of Alfred Nobel, the 19th-century inventor of dynamite. But it is extraordinary that two winners are almost simultaneously battling accusations of behaviour that is widely regarded as antithetical to the spirit and purpose of the award, first given in 1901.
On Wednesday, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmar leader who won the prize in 1991, appeared before the International Court of Justice and denied accusations that her government had committed genocide against the Rohingya minority. Her defence of Myanmar at the court was a jarring contrast to her onetime identity as an intrepid champion of human rights and democracy.
And on Tuesday, the 2019 winner, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia, facing accusations of a heavy-handed crackdown on political protests, skipped a news conference after his acceptance speech.
In some years, critics have questioned the worthiness of winners without marquee accomplishments — like the 2012 award to the European Union, for example, or the 2009 award to President Barack Obama, just months into his first term.
In other instances — perhaps most famously the 1973 award to Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, as the Vietnam War was still raging — the track records of winners have been ridiculed. (The singer Tom Lehrer famously said that the choice of Kissinger had rendered political satire obsolete.)
In the case of Suu Kyi, some critics have suggested that the criteria for selecting winners should be reassessed — including the possibility that the honour could be rescinded. Such questions are inherent to the prize regardless who is chosen, said Dr Richard B Gunderman, a professor at Indiana University who has written about the prize’s history.
“The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize has always been fraught with peril, subject to the current drift of public opinion and political and nationalistic motives and prejudices,” Gunderman said.
“Like all human judgments, the Nobel committee’s decisions are prone to error,” he said. “It should do the best it can and then live with the consequences.”
Here are some other notably contentious Nobel Peace Prize nominees and winners:
Hitler and Stalin: Adolf Hitler was nominated in 1939 by a member of Sweden’s Parliament, EGC Brandt, who apparently meant it as a satire against the leader of Nazi Germany, and never intended the choice to be seriously considered. But the nomination created such outrage that it was quickly withdrawn. Josef Stalin, Hitler’s nemesis and the leader of the Soviet Communist Party, was nominated twice — in 1945 and 1948 — for his efforts to end World War II. Despite Stalin’s murderous purges and pogroms, those nominations were taken in earnest.
Cordell Hull: The American statesmen Cordell Hull won in 1945 for his role in establishing the United Nations. Six years earlier, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, he took steps that led Roosevelt to deny permission for 950 Jewish refugees aboard the liner St. Louis, fleeing Nazi persecution, to seek asylum in the United States. Many of the passengers on the trip, known as the Voyage of the Damned, later died in the Holocaust.
Yasser Arafat: The chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation shared the 1994 prize with the Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for the Oslo Accords, still widely regarded as the basis for a peace process. But many critics assailed the choice of Arafat because of his role in acts of terrorism against Israelis.
Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho: The 1973 prize was awarded to Secretary of State Henry A Kissinger and the North Vietnam statesman Le Duc Tho for having negotiated a cease-fire in the Vietnam War. Many critics of the war — which would not be over for two more years — ridiculed the choice of Kissinger, and his Vietnamese counterpart refused to accept the award on grounds that he United States had violated the cease-fire.
