WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 (UPI) -- One must hope for the best, but it is hard not to fear the worst for the cause of controlling nuclear weapons now that the International Atomic Energy Agency has fallen under the curse that seems to attend so many winners of the Nobel Peace Prize since it was first awarded to commemorate the man who got rich by inventing dynamite back in 1901.
This year's award to Mohamed El-Baradei and the IAEA recognizes the work they have out into monitoring Iran's nuclear ambitions. It may also be a little tweak of President George Bush's tail feathers, since Baradei stoutly refused to give the Bush administration the verdict against Iraq that was sought before the war. That, after all, seems to have been the motive behind the 2002 award to former President Jimmy Carter.
It is all very well to use the Peace Prize to make a political point, or to recognize the Iran human rights activist Shirin Ebadi as they did in 2003, or to hail last year the founder of Africa's Green Belt movement, Wangari Maathai. But it is getting repetitive to continue awarding the Peace Prize to the United Nations and its various agencies -- like this year's prize.
No fewer than 15 of the Peace Prizes since 1945 have gone to the U.N. or its agencies or its staff, often with unhappy consequences. Kofi Annan won the prize in 2001, a time when the Oil for Food scandal was festering in secret bank accounts in the world's choicer tax havens. The U.N. Peacekeeping Forces, the Blue Helmets, won the prize in 1988, on the eve of the decade in which they were fail so wretchedly in the Balkans. The International Labor Organization won the prize in 1969, about the last time when the advanced industrial nations of Europe and North American could claim to be enjoying full employment.
In addition to those cited already, the U.N.'s laureates are:
-- The Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1981 and in 1954,
-- France's Rene Cassim, father of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, in 1968;
-- The U.N. International Children's Fund (UNICEF) in 1965;
-- Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden, U.N. secretary-general (awarded posthumously) in 1961;
-- Britain's Philip Noel-Baker, who helped found the League of Nations and the U.N., in 1959;
-- Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, for helping resolve the Suez conflict, in 1957;
-- France's Leon Jouhaux, a labor leader who helped found the ILO in 1919 and was a French delegate to the U.N. General Assembly, in 1953;
-- American, Ralph Bunche, U.N. mediator in Palestine, in 1950;
-- Britain's Lord Boyd-Orr, founding director general of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, in 1949;
-- American Cordell Hull, former U.S. secretary of state who helped found the U.N., in 1945.
These awards to the U.N. are all very well, if one approves of international civil servants getting very large sums of money for doing what they are paid for professionally. And the Nobel Peace Prize committee did just the same for the old League of Nations, whose luminaries or institutions were awarded five of the prizes between 1919 and 1939 (and there were five years when no award was made). They got nine, if one includes the Nansen passport system for stateless people and the parallel 'Society of Nations.'
And between 1901 and 1914, the worthies of the International Peace Bureau based in Switzerland won six peace prizes. And in 1974, having survived two world wars, the League of Nations, a Cold War, and the coming of the UN, the International Peace Bureau was still in there fighting, and shared a Peace Prize in 1974 for its President, Sean MacBride, better known in his youth to the forces of law and order in Dublin and London as a senior officer of the Irish Republican Army
Perhaps, as with Israel's Menachem Begin or Dr. Henry Kissinger, MacBride's prize was awarded for conversion to more peaceful paths. More likely, it was the longevity of the Peace Bureau that did it. They do love their institutions, the Norwegians who sit in the committee that decides the prizes. They also like international law, and it seems a safe bet that the new International Criminal Court will be getting the fat check from Oslo in the foreseeable future -- and probably all the faster because the Bush administration refuses to join it.
There is something rather sad about the blasted hopes that all these Peace Prizes represent, the disappointments and the disillusion and the deep frustration of well-meaning people at the stubborn refusal of poor, flawed humanity to be reasonable and sit down and resolve their differences through compromise and the rule of international law. It goes against all logic that people and nations should resort so often to war when we all know how uncontrollable the violence almost inevitably becomes -- witness the bloody aftermath of the Iraq war. And yet war is such a constant in human affairs that we might almost call it endemic, coded into our genes.
The British economist and humanist Norman Angell, another Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, made a global reputation (after working as a ditch-digger in the American West and then as a reporter in St Louis) for arguing that war had become quite obsolete in the modern world, that the great industrial powers were far too inter-dependent ever to resort to violence, and if the politicians dared and generals dared to try, then the bankers and industrialists and the workers would prevent them. His book, "The Great Illusion," was published just four years before the outbreak of World War I.
It is in this rather unfortunate sense that there seems to be some kind of curse on the Peace Prize, or at least on many of its recipients. Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin won it, along with Shimon Peres, in 1994. Rabin was assassinated, Arafat is dead and not greatly mourned, and while Peres is happily still with us, that is more than can be said for the abortive Oslo peace process their Nobel prize rewarded.
MIkhail Gorbachev got his prize in 1990, just before the collapse of the country he was trying to reform. In 1976, the Belfast Women for Peace got the prize, without much impact on the long terrorist campaign of the IRA, and while John Hume and David Trimble were recognized for the work in finally bringing about the Northern Ireland cease fire, it was but a prelude to Trimble's political eclipse. It is not as though the Peace Prize conveys much protection; Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi was the laureate in 1991, and has barely been out of house arrest since.
We had better pass over without comment the most infamous award of all, the 1973 Peace Prize to Dr. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, supposedly for their efforts in trying to resolve the Vietnam War. Saigon fell 18 months later; the curse of Nobel strikes again.
Let's hope it spares this year's winners, for if the curse is to make yet again a mockery of the peace laureate system and the IAEA falls into disrepute or fails to do its job of keeping the nuclear age under some kind of organized supervision, then the price of failure could be very high indeed. And right now, caught between Iran's proven record of nuclear deception on the one hand, and Israel's fear for its existence and America's mistrust on Tehran on the other, the IAEA is in one of the hottest seats on the planet, trying to control a explosive that make Alfred Nobel's dynamite look like kitchen match.
