In a world at war where only hindsight will determine if and how deep into the weeds of a third global conflict the world has waded has painted the peace prize committee into a corner that if not the Houthi, then no one. (Wikimedia Commons)
Nobel Peace Prize laureates are as much a rogue’s gallery, as a roll-call for the “small grains of sand changing the course of great rivers.”
The gong’s 1901 inception inaugurated a century industrialising war, mutually assured destruction philosophies, vocabulary for genocide, ethnic-cleansing and apartheid, while satisfying blue chip military industrial complex corporates’ voracious appetites for blockbuster shareholder dividends.
The shit-show seamlessly flowing into a febrile 2025. The world’s most prestigious accolade was one of history’s bad omens.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, or laureates, will be announced on 10th October ahead of the Oslo, Norway, 10 December award ceremony – coinciding with the peace crown’s founder and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel’s birthday.
The committee confirms 338 candidates were under consideration but only officially discloses runners and riders 50 years later and a courtesy as water-tight as a sieve.
There are years when pickings were slim, others when the prize was withheld to avoid risking gallows humour’s condemnation, as well as the awkward “jailed and jailer” joint-recipients through the Trumpian “very fine people on both sides” kaleidoscope or overlooking the obvious from a short-list of one.
Regrets, rejects and shunned
Peace icon and “spiritual” independence movement leader Mahatma Gandhi was nominated five times for the prize and the last nod gaining a shortlisting a few days before his 1948 assassination five months after India celebrated ending centuries of British occupation.
Gandhi’s inspiring non-violent civil disobedience strategies broke the sub-continent’s colonial shackles ending a $45 trillion looting bonanza. A cause only deemed worthy by the paragons of peace once safe from incurring a dwindling empire’s “righteous” wrath. In the event, the prize was voided that year because “there was no suitable living candidate” the committee decided in an attempt to salvage a soiled reputation.
Nobel committee secretary Geir Lundestad said in 2006: “The greatest omission … is undoubtedly that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel peace prize. Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace Prize, whether the Nobel committee can do without Gandhi is the question.”
Peace prize rejects sullying the committee’s credentials include US’s four-term First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a life-long anti-poverty activist and leading advocate for the lynchpin 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ humanitarian creed.
Corazon “Cory” Aquino, among others, was also cold shouldered after spearheading the largely peaceful 1986 overthrow of US-backed Philippines dictator President Ferdinand Marcos. Similar disdain was meted-out to Nigeria’s subsequently executed Ken Saro-Wiwa opposing fossil fuel corporate Shell’s Ogoniland ecocide and community poisoning in cahoots with Sani Abacha’s military dictatorship.
The good, bad and ugly
Judged on such a rare and philosophical commodity, many of the 142 peace laureates to date have been dogged by controversy, nonchalance or bemusement.
Former US president Barack Obama’s 2009 prize, gained in his first year ensconced in the Oval Office, acknowledged his multilateralist imperatives and declared “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”
Cynics dismiss the committee’s official version as a cover story muffling applause for a white settler colonial state — founded on multiple genocides and slavery’s industrialisation — installing a black leader into the White House after more than 500 years of racial oppression.
Few quibble about the committee’s 1997 decision rewarding the International Committee to Ban Landmines and founding coordinator Jody Williams, or Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s 1984 prize recognising a non-violent apartheid resistance doctrine, joining other laureates of equal calibre dulling detractors’ barbs.
The committee plumbed cesspits memorialising Henry Kissinger, precipitating two members’ resignations disgusted at glossing-over the former US secretary of state’s documented crimes against humanity. The joint 1973 peace prize also attained a first after Vietnam War ceasefire negotiator and Hanoi diplomat Le Duc Tho declined partnering a war criminal and refused the “honour.”
Junking the peace prize
Gaza and Sudan’s free-reign genocides and Ukraine’s unresolved and burgeoning conventional war, among the about 56 conflicts in motion, present a strong case blanking this year’s peace prize and would mark the 20th occasion the annual award had been left vacant.
Despite the committee’s half-century confidentiality clause, media speculation, leaks and boasts create a template for whose in the peace prize zoo.
US president Donald Trump’s nomination dances with the absurd and expected relegation to footnote would add another grievance to a billionaire’s unlimited victimhood scroll. Among serious nominees are special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese and the International Criminal Court — sanctioned by Trump after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu war crimes’ indictment.
The Houthi justified attacking Israel and imposing a Red Sea naval blockade without a navy to thwart a genocide — while others dithered — and may or may not be pencilled-in for the prize. The Houthi tick the box by dint of obeying the 1948 Genocide Convention’s central commandment “to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge”.
The D-word
Denialism is genocide’s twin. Former US president Bill Clinton’s administration were paranoid uttering the word would trigger the convention’s “obligation” to intervene during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and adopted “The G-word” as a conversational tweak and shallow complicity defence.
Clinton’s failure to respect international law enabled post-genocide Rwanda President Paul Kagame to mute Washington criticism, including guaranteed UN Security Council vetos, excusing grave war crimes and “genocidal retribution” after the conflict shifted to neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, in the mass killing’s aftermath.
There was no confusion among journalists reporting Rwanda’s barbarism as whether “it was or wasn’t genocide fever”, or any doubts by the UN peacekeeping commander Colonel Roméo Dallaire. His plea for US heavy-lift transport aircraft, when none other were available, to ferry armoured vehicles and troop reinforcements to suppress the slaughter in the first weeks was denied by grammar.
Rwanda’s 100-day killing spree’s peculiar shame was last century’s “most efficient” genocide massacring at least 800,000 people. The majority ethnic Tutsis, as well as Hutu’s refusing to join hate’s butchery.
A farmer’s panga was the primary implement reducing Rwanda to a morgue. The dead’s grotesque sculptures and grimaces populating landscapes. Water courses clogged by corpses and churches carpeted by putrefying congregants.
Bound by suffering
Prior to the Gaza Genocide, Yemen was rated the most miserable geography. Since Yemen’s 2014 civil war commenced, Saudi Arabia’s built-in-America war machine has supported former government remnants against the Houthi by obliterating civilians and infrastructure. The war’s bitterness was enhanced by Islam’s Sunni and Shia sects’ long-standing schism.
Hundreds of thousands have died from starvation, disease or ripped-apart by US supplied 2,000 pound bombs and other ordnance that also serves as an ideal Gaza domicide tool (deliberate built-environment erasure) where guilt is defined by presence.
Like the poor supporting the poor, while corporate chief executives and governments pontificate about the One Percent’s tax rates, Yemen’s descent into hell forged the bond between the region’s outcasts.
The Houthi’s invoking the Genocide Convention “obligation” acting against the “crimes of crimes” was dismissed as “terrorism” by the West that authored the ground-breaking humanitarian document in the wake of Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust, or Shoah, eviscerating six million European Jews.
History’s macabre irony is animated by World War II’s Warsaw Ghetto reincarnated as Gaza. Israel’s far right religious fundamentalist ethno-nationalist government talking loud about “Greater Israel,” oblivious to lebensraum’s (living space) “walk like a duck, and quack like a duck” Nazi comparisons, and Death March echoes from shuffling starving, sick, wounded and bereaved populations through mazes of rubble and lost memories.
There can only be one
Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal raised the alarm six days after Hamas’s 7 October incursion — killing 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals — that the Israeli Defence Forces’ retaliation had reached “genocidal” proportions.
The Holocaust and Genocide Studies programme director at New Jersey’s Stockton University, told author, political commentator, Presbyterian minister and former New York Times’ Middle East bureau chief Chris Hedges in a recent interview: “The whole idea about prevention and ‘never again’ is that — as we teach our students — there are red flags that once we notice them, we’re supposed to work in order to stop the process that could escalate to genocide, even if it’s not genocidal yet.”
In a world at war where only hindsight will determine if and how deep into the weeds of a third global conflict the world has waded has painted the peace prize committee into a corner that if not the Houthi, then no one.
Guy Oliver reported from Kigali during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide.