[Nasional-e] The 'Carter problem' solved at last

[Ambon]

 The 'Carter problem' solved at last

 Michael Wines The New York Times Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Nobel committee had fretted for years

OSLO The Norwegian Nobel Committee had a problem, said the committee's
urbane secretary, Geir Lundestad. Its name was James Earl Carter.
.
What to do about the 39th president of the United States? He brokered a
peace that had been thought impossible between Israel and Egypt - and missed
the Nobel Peace Prize for 1978 because of a technicality.
.
For the next 23 years, Carter's stock as a humanitarian and a global
peacemaker had done nothing but soar. And each year, the Nobel jurors had
bestowed the honor elsewhere.
.
Carter grew older and grayer. Nobel historians began looking over their
shoulders, recalling how past jurors repeatedly passed over Mahatma Gandhi
until his assassination in 1948 made his candidacy moot.
.
"There was a building feeling on the committee that we just had to do
something about the Carter problem," Lundestad said during an interview
Saturday in his Oslo office. "But it became a bit difficult. What would be
the specific context? What had he done the previous year?"
.
This year finally provided the context, though somewhat unexpectedly. On
Friday, Jimmy Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize "for his decades
of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts" -
and, by the declaration of the prize panel's chairman, for his labors as a
critic of the Bush administration's pistols-cocked brand of geopolitics.
.
That solved the jurors' Carter problem. But it has created a rift among them
and a new, if less vexing difficulty: how to dispel any suspicion that this
particular prize is but a pretext for upbraiding a White House that many
Europeans see as abandoning diplomacy for force.
.
The Nobel prizes are often set to political background music, if only
because the prestige of the awards and their recipients make the temptation
to wield them for larger purposes almost irresistible, say Nobel jurors and
other experts. That is especially true of the peace prize, often called the
world's highest honor.
.
The most important word, however, is "background." By tradition, Nobel
awards celebrate their recipients first and make other points only by
nuance. Carter's award is unusual because its political context has been
explicit almost since the moment it was announced, even if some members of
the committee did not intend it that way.
.
Asked at a news conference Friday whether the award was meant as a "kick in
the leg" to the White House of George W. Bush, the Nobel committee's
chairman, Gunnar Berge, unexpectedly replied, "The answer to your question
is an unequivocal yes." The prize, he said, "must be interpreted as a
criticism of the present U.S. administration."
.
"I hope it will strengthen what Carter has to say," he added. "He has a more
moderate point of view than the sitting administration."
.
The question was a natural one. Carter had just written a scathing assault
on the Bush administration's policy on Iraq that was published in the
opinion pages of The Washington Post.
.
Moreover, the peace prize citation itself referred obliquely to Iraq, noting
that "in a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Mr.
Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be
resolved through mediation and international cooperation."
.
But Berge's bluntness was anything but natural. Although he placed the
comments in his own context, saying that Carter's exclusion from the 1978
prize had been a mistake that the committee was proud to correct, he opened
a rare public split among the five Nobel jurors. Some of them say he should
have let the written citation speak, albeit obliquely, for itself.
.
"We all agreed on that," Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, the most conservative of the
five jurors. "But I also made it quite clear in advance that I would not
accept any criticism of the Bush regime, that this should not be underlined
any more than what was in the statement. And I didn't see what was in the
statement as a criticism of the Bush regime."
.
Gunnar Staalsett, the Lutheran bishop of Oslo and one of the Nobel
committee's more liberal jurors, said in a telephone interview that he
agreed with Berge. But some things, he said, are better left unsaid. "The
prize is always for someone, not against someone, and we are very clear on
that."
.
Worse controversies have beset the Nobel Peace Prize. Kaare Kristiansen quit
the committee in 1994 rather than endorse the awarding of the prize to
Yasser Arafat. In an interview Sunday, he called Berge's remarks
inexcusable.
.
"It's an insult to this year's laureate," he said. "When they use the award
as a political weapon against a government and the leaders of his own
country, you may have an indication that they didn't think the official
grounds for awarding the prize to Carter were strong enough."
.
For his part, Berge is largely unrepentant. Nobel Peace Prizes, he said in a
telephone interview Sunday, are often larger than their recipients. The 1998
award to John Hume and David Trimble, he said, was a clear effort to spur
the peace efforts in Northern Ireland. The 2001 prize to Secretary-General
Kofi Annan of the United Nations was an endorsement of patient diplomacy and
support for human rights in the face of global terrorism.
.
"We like our decision to also send a message to the parties involved, and
the outside world, and that has been the case many times," Berge said. "But
this year was a very special situation, because I think the committee didn't
want to be associated with the stance the present administration in
Washington has taken - especially in the U.S.-Iraq conflict, but also in the
way they are acting generally."
.
Berge added: "We are giving support to people and voices in the United
States that have taken a different view of this conflict, but I am not too
optimistic that we will have any influence on President Bush."