(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As five Norwegians get ready to announce the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo Friday, they will be prepared for the international chorus of cheers and boos that inevitably accompany the proclamation. Once the ceremony is concluded, the members of the prize committee will keep their fingers indefinitely crossed that the winner doesn't, by deed or word, bring them embarrassment and defile the laurels they have conferred.
The anxiety is very much justified. Even as the committee was debating on who should receive the prize this year, a strong case was building for Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (winner in 2019) to be prosecuted for war crimes. His soldiers committed hideous atrocities against ethnic Tigrayans in the country's north during a civil war that started less than a year after he had collected the prize.
Abiy is far from the first laureate to dishonor, by commission or omission, the high principles espoused by the Swedish industrialist (and inventor of dynamite) who founded the awards. In his will, Alfred Nobel decreed that the peace prize should go:
That sentence doesn't immediately conjure up images of Henry Kissinger (co-winner in 1973) or Yasser Arafat (co-winner in 1994), whose commitment to peace was opportunistic rather than principled. And nor even of Barak Obama (winner in 2009), who was ennobled barely nine months into his first term and did little thereafter to live up to the honor.
The prize committee has traditionally defended these choices by arguing they were correct . [Emphasis mine.] This, the members would have us believe, absolves them of any post-facto misdeeds by the laureates. They further point out that the rules governing the prize don't allow for the laurels to be recalled.
The committee doth protest too much, methinks. I can think of at least three instances where the we-couldn't-have-known excuse just won't stand up to scrutiny. Documents released at the start of this year show the members in 1973 were fully aware that Kissinger's Vietnam peace deal was unlikely to end the war. Even desultory due-diligence on Kofi Annan (co-winner in 2001) would have revealed that his stint as head of the United Nations peacekeeping forces from 1992 to 1996 was characterized by bloody failures in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. And in ennobling Obama prematurely, they willfully took a reckless gamble. (You have to wonder if the members experienced a sinking feeling during the then-president's acceptance speech, which was an eloquent defense of war.)
In any case, the committee can hardly be unaware that the prize, once awarded, is forever associated with, and usually prefixed to, the name of the recipient. The laurels never fade, but they can be stained with blood, as by Kissinger, Arafat and Abiy.
They can also be tarnished by political perfidy, as by Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi (winner in 1991). In 2019, when she was de-facto ruler of the country, she defended the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Myanmar's Rohingya minority by the very military that had previously held her captive. For her pains, she would be deposed by the military in 2021 and once again put behind bars.
Facing calls to strip Suu Kyi of the prize in 2017, Berit Reiss-Andersen, head of the prize committee, demurred. “It's not our task to oversee or censor what a laureate does after the prize has been won,” she said. “The prizewinners themselves have to safeguard their own reputations.”
Nice try, but no cigar. The actions of Abiy and Suu Kyi sully the prize as well as the committee that confers it. It is no accident that the curtain-raisers to the annual announcement are now usually accompanied by discussions of questionable choices in the past.
There are ways for the committee to mitigate the risk of another embarrassment. The boring way would be to choose institutions rather than individuals, as it did with the World Food Program (2020), the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (2017), the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (2013), or the European Union (2012).
But these are uninspiring picks, and they undermine one of the main purposes of the prize, which is to inspire people to aspire for higher ideals. This would be best achieved when the prize goes to individuals, in whom we can see ourselves and in whose footsteps we can hope to follow.
How should the committee pick people and prevent them from thereafter bringing shame to the prize? Two obvious solutions present themselves. The first is to award the laurels posthumously; the second is to add a clause to the award that allows the committee to retroactively rescind the honor if necessary.
A dead laureate can't do anything to diminish the prize; and if it turns out she or he did something untoward in life that was previously missed, the committee can strike them off the Nobel rolls. This would also absolve the committee of the need to dole out cash with the prizes, an unseemly practice that puts a price on nobility.
An added bonus: This would spare us the tawdry annual spectacle in which unworthy figures are “nominated” for the prize. I'm thinking especially of a former American president and a current Russian president.
This would require a change of rules, of course, but it's been done before. Until 1974, the rules allowed a posthumous prize, provided the recipient had been nominated before February. That's how Erik Axel Karlfeldt won the literature prize in 1931 and Dag Hammarskjöld the peace prize in 1961. Now, a prize can only be awarded posthumously if the recipient died between announcement in October and the award ceremony in December.
Rules changed once can be again, and the committee would save themselves much unease — and the prize much prestige — if they do it before next October.
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering culture. Previously, he covered foreign affairs.
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