REALPOLITIK: Trevor Royle
On Wednesday, Martti Ahtisaari will step up to the podium in Oslo's City Hall and accept this year's Nobel Peace prize. It's always a glittering occasion, made sonorous by the fact that during the ceremony the new laureate, a former president of Finland, will deliver the traditional lecture in the presence of King Harald V of Norway. The same day will see the presentation of the other Nobel prizes in Stockholm but by its very nature it's the Oslo gig that attracts the most interest.
While it's easy to make an objective judgment about chemistry, physics or literature, peace is mercurial and open to question. The selection process is also not helped by the woolly definition given by the prize's benefactor Alfred Nobel, that the award should go to the "to the 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".
As a result, the well-meaning prize has attracted its fair share of controversy. Ahtisaari is a respectable recipient with a well-earned reputation as an international peace-broker, but the same cannot be said of all of those who preceded him. No-one would blink at the awards made to giants such as Albert Schweitzer (1952) or Martin Luther King (1964); folk of their ilk conform to Christ's promise that they can be called the children of God.
But what about those whose reputations have not stood the test of time and were perhaps singled out too quickly or before their involvement in the peace-making process had been properly quantified?
Was it really right to give the 1973 award to Henry Kissinger? Or, 21 years later, to present the award jointly to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat? Probably not. For all their many virtues, the best that can be handed down to them is a verdict of "not proven".
Kissinger shared the prize with the North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho, who refused to accept the honour because the ceasefire negotiated in Paris was no such thing. At least the US secretary of state had the grace not to turn up in Oslo for the award ceremony.
Equally, for all that the two Israeli leaders and Arafat managed to sit down in the same room without reaching for their side-arms, the Oslo Accords went nowhere and the peace process in the region is still a contradiction in terms. Worse, Rabin paid for the initiative by being gunned down in 1995, the year after he received the prize. He was a good man and did not deserve such a fate at the hands of a deluded right-wing fanatic who thought that he was saving Israel.
Then there were the ones who got away and were either ignored or were nominated only to drop at the next hurdle. Two Indians come into that category, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, both of whom would have added lustre to the prize but somehow slipped through the net. Others who might have been considered include Cesar Chavez, who did so much to advance the cause of US agricultural workers, and the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died in police custody in 1977. Giving the prize to either man would have been a political statement and one which would have upset the US and South African governments of the day. In the latter's case a posthumous award would have been impossible under the terms of Nobel's will.
Mind you, there have also been some near misses: in their time, both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were nominated for the honour.
That leaves Martti Ahtisaari, who has spent a lifetime doing good works and at the very least deserves the accolade for services rendered. After being employed by various aid agencies in Pakistan and Africa he gravitated into the world of diplomacy, working firstly for the Finnish foreign service and then for the United Nations. His big moment came in 1989 when he negotiated Namibia's independence in the face of South African intransigence and armed opposition from Angola.
With his star in the ascendant, Ahtisaari ran for president and during his period in office Finland found itself emerging as a key diplomatic player, an experience which his fellow Finns found both exhilarating and slightly alarming. Under his guidance the country joined the EU and all the time he continued his involvement in the world's affairs, notably and most successfully in Northern Ireland, where he oversaw the arms decommissioning process, and in Kosovo, where he developed the plan for the province's final status.
So far the only objectors have been those Serbs who rejected Kosovo's decision to break away, and place the blame on the blueprint drawn up by Ahtisaari. As previous Nobel beneficiaries have found, you can't win everything.
