DHRUBA H ADHIKARY

DHRUBA H ADHIKARY

Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, had a premonition that the choice of winner for 2010 peace prize would be controversial. “You will understand when you will hear the name,” he told a local television shortly before the announcement on Oct 8. And the name was Liu Xiaobo, the man who, in 2008, received a prison term for 11 years after being convicted for violating China’s law on subversion against the state.

As anticipated, Beijing’s reaction to the information released in Oslo was prompt and stinging as was evident in the statement issued by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Norway’s government quickly sought to distance itself from the Nobel committee, describing it as an entity independent of state control.

That the prize for peace ceased to be Nobel’s and has become a prize of Storting (Norway’s parliament) came through a comment given by jurist Fredrik S Heffermhl. And this comment is based on the fact that the Nobel’s committee consists of five persons chosen by Storting. In other words, it is this group of five which determines whether a person (or an institution) reflects the WILL of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor who set up Nobel prizes before he died in 1896. Records have it that he wished to award the peace prize to a person who…“shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” The first prizes, including the one for peace, were awarded in 1901.

Has Liu made any remarkable or substantive contribution in the direction suggested by Nobel? There are doubts and controversies. Some media outlets in Britain, for instance, raised questions pertaining to this. In a debate conducted through the columns of the The New York Times, Kishore Mahbubani of National University of Singapore echoed this view by pointing out to the fact that the award has not been celebrated by very many Chinese intellectuals, inside or outside China, publicly or privately. His apprehension is that Nobel committee’s decision could do “more harm than good” as it might cause a setback in the progress toward more personal freedom in China. Earlier, Nobel committee chairman Jagland had compared Liu with Andrei Sakharov of the former Soviet Union. This contention, says Mahbubani – one of Singapore’s prized diplomats – gives credence to the Chinese conviction that the goal of the prize is to destabilize China. The Chinese have also seen Mikhail Gorbachev being made a recipient of Nobel Peace Prize. The contemporary world has witnessed Gorbachev presiding over the disintegration of the Soviet Union!

In the The New York Times article headlined “Why We Gave Liu Xiaobo a Nobel” Jagland offered arguments for defending Nobel committee’s controversial selection. “No country has a right to ignore its international obligations,” he declared, rejecting Beijing’s perception of external interference. However, China does not seem to be prepared to accept this contention and sees the West’s double standards on issues like this one. The English language Chinese media is an indicator of the level of Beijing’s anger on this subject. China Daily, for example, has reproduced some of the views Liu gave in an interview published in a Hong Kong magazine in 1988. In reply to a question about the conditions when China could possibly realize a historic transformation, Liu purportedly said the following: “After going through a hundred years of colonial rule, Hong Kong has become what it is now. The mainland is so big that it certainly needs 300 years of colonization by the West to achieve Hong Kong’s progress.”

And by using the pronoun “we”, Jagland has implied that Nobel committee’s decision represents the West as one entity.

Has Liu Xiaobo made any remarkable or substantive contribution in the direction suggested by Nobel? There are doubts and controversies. Some media outlets in Britain, for instance, raised questions pertaining to this.

In 2009, the Nobel’s committee decided to honour President Barack Obama, sparking off a worldwide debate as to how he qualified to be the recipient of the award at an early stage of his presidency. In his acceptance speech delivered in Oslo, in front of an impressive audience that included the King of Norway, on Dec 10 last year, Obama himself mentioned about the “considerable controversy” revolving around his selection. He knew there were men and women “to be far more deserving of this honour than I.”

On the basis of this remark, one can hazard a guess that one man on his mind at that time was Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, Obama’s views clearly surfaced during his visit to India this year. Those who watched Obama addressing the Indian parliament on Nov 8 did not have any difficulty in recognizing whom the distinguished American visitor was alluding to. He referred to the philosophy of non-violent resistance Gandhi propounded, acknowledging that Gandhi’s message inspired him as well as many other people across the world. Unfortunately, the Nobel committee that spotted Obama last year had failed to recognize the person who was his main source of inspiration years ago!

Gandhi is not the lone exception. Johan Galtung, Maxim Gorky, Jurgen Habermas and Deng Xiaoping are some of the notable names which have failed to attract Nobel committee’s attention, and recognition. Professor Galtung, a native of Norway itself, earned worldwide acclamation for his initiatives on peace research and conflict studies. Gorky, who began his career as a journalist, was a respected Russian author and a founder of Socialist Realism. Habermas, a German sociologist and philosopher, is recognized for his contributions to the deliberative democratic theory as well as for communicative rationality. Deng’s reforms led China to a marked level of prosperity. In TIME magazine’s assessment, Deng was “the Maoist who reinvented himself, transformed a nation and changed the world.”

Available figures show that China, at the start of Deng’s reforms in 1978, had 800 million people living under absolute poverty. Today, it has come down to 200 million. In other words, 600 million people were lifted out of absolute poverty in a period of about 30 years. A question obviously arises: Has not this prosperity made a solid contribution toward the peace in this trouble-torn world?

Gandhi and Deng, both Asian luminaries, have offered their services together with others for the upliftment of humankind. And the world has seen the changing scenario. But the Nobel committee in Norway preferred to turn a blind eye to these striking strides. If Jagland is seriously worried for the reputation of the Nobel committee he heads, he too needs to listen to voices expressed from far and wide. After all, it is an issue associated with the freedom of expression.