OSLO, Oct 11 (Askume) – The winner of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in Oslo on Friday. Here are some past winners, as well as those who didn’t win but should have.
martin luther king
Gunal Jain, then-chairman of the awards organization, said that the leaders of the American civil rights movement were “the first people in the Western world who showed us that struggles can be fought without violence”.
“He was the first to make a message of brotherly love a reality in the midst of conflict, and he spread this message to all people, all nations and races.”
At age 35, he was also the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner at the time. The youngest recipient today is Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai, who was 17 when she won the prize in 2014.
nelson mandela
The Nobel Peace Prize has often caused controversy, but Geir Lundestad, secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee at the time, said in 1993 that most people believed Mandela’s victory was “self-evident”.
Mandela spent 27 years in prison but still called for peaceful change to end apartheid in South Africa.
Lundstad said in his 2015 memoir that it was unclear whether the award was presented jointly with Frederick William de Klerk, South Africa’s last white leader.
Lundstad reported that many people said Mandela should have won alone, while others said Mandela could not have won peace without allies. Ultimately, the pair were honored for encouraging South Africa’s peaceful transition to a democratic South Africa, a process that had not been completed by the time of the award.
Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho
Among the most controversial awards were those given in 1973 to top US diplomat Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho for their efforts to reach the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, under which Washington completed its military withdrawal from South Vietnam.
The Nobel Committee’s decision surprised many at the time because Kissinger had played a major role in US military strategy during the final stages of the Vietnam War from 1955–75.
Le Duc Tho refused to accept the award on the grounds that peace had not yet been established. Two of the five members of the committee resigned in protest.
When Kissinger accepted the prize he did not go to Norway to attend the award ceremony and later tried, but failed, to return the prize.
Internal documents released in 2023 reveal that the committee at the time made this decision with full knowledge that the Vietnam War was unlikely to end in the near future.
Aung San Suu Kyi
Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the few women to win the award, was one of a series of human rights activists who won the Nobel Peace Prize for their non-violent struggle for democracy against Myanmar’s military dictatorship in the 1990s.
For years he was considered one of the top recipients of the award, but a UN investigation in 2017 found him guilty of “genocidal intent” by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who led Myanmar’s civilian government at the time, was criticised for failing to speak out against the military crackdown on the Rohingya .
Following a new military coup in 2021, Aung San Suu Kyi was again arrested.Aung San Suu Kyi, 79, has been detained and is in poor health, according to her son .
Mahatma Gandhi
According to Lundstad, he was on the list of candidates discussed within the committee five times, and the committee was preparing to award him the prize in 1948, the year of his assassination.
The committee could have given this honour posthumously—it was possible then but it is not possible now—but they did not do so.
Rundstedt believes this may have been because the committee did not want to offend Norway’s close ally Britain, India’s former colonial power, or because Eurocentric committee members thought Gandhi’s politics were too “foreign” or would be seen as “unpopular”.
He said violence during the partition of India may have also played a role in this. At least one million people were killed and 1.5 million people were rendered homeless.
Nonetheless, Rundstedt wrote in his memoirs, “At these rests, Mahatma Gandhi stood alone.”
“It is extremely unfortunate that the leading exponent of nonviolence in the 20th century never received the Nobel Peace Prize.”
