Barack Obama's Nobel prize: Why now?

Obama as an African should behave like Africans and reject this Nobel Prize because he knows that he does not deserve it.

@ Peter You might want to correct the errors in this statement:
"Teddy Roosevelt opened the court of arbitration in The Hague and helped mediate a peace treaty between Russia and Japan..."

1. I think you have confused two American presidents with the same last name.
Teddy (Theodore) Roosevelt was the 26th president and served from 1901-09. He had been Vice=President under McKinley. When McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Roosevelt succeeded him.

Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel for Prize Peace for his efforts to mediate a peace between the Russians and the Japanese in 1905. Theodore died in 1919--long before the court was established at The Hague.

2. Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 and served until his death, 12 April, 1945--a month before the end of the Second World War. He was the longest serving President in American history. Roosevelt met Churchill and Stalin at Yalta (in the Russian Crimea) in Feb 1945 to plan for the post-war recovery of Europe and the dissolution of the Nazi regime.

The Japanese did not participate in this meetings and the war in the Pacific continued until the end of August 1945. (The dropping of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not bring an immediate surrender as Truman had hoped. It took several more weeks to persuade the Japanese to surrender.,)

The International Court at The Hague was created by the UN and began its work in 1946. The Nazi War Crimes Tribunal was held at Nuremberg, Germany.

Footnote: The Teddy Bear was named in honour of Theodore Roosevelt who refused to participate in a bear hunt when he discovered that the bear had already been captured and 'shoot' was therefore 'canned'. He also created the first national parks as federally protected lands in the US. As such he is often considered the 'father' of the conservation efforts in the US.

Sechaba - you mean he should install cadres into the Nobel committee and give his mates free Nobels every year, then sell the influence he has to the biggest mafia he can find on the continent.

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a cheap bauble given to undeserving people. Obama's award only proves it yet again. The man has done absolutely nothing.

It is preposterous to award the Nobel Peace Price to an American President who has barely begun his tenure.
During this time, he has held numerous speeches full of promises and good intentions. It is true, he is a great orator, thanks to the fact that he has learned to master the auto cue as no other politician. But history shows that orators often turn out to be demagogues. And one may well wonder whether idealists make good peacemakers.
The hard realities on the ground have hardly changed since his predecessor George Bush Jr. left the scene.
Is it not ironic that the man who is now being hailed as the greatest peacemaker of our time, is - at this very moment - seriously considering to up the military ante in the dirty war in Afghanistan?.
The decision to honour Obama with the Nobel Peace Price looks even more shrill if one considers that the nomination was made when the man had been in office for a mere 2 weeks.
Nobel Peace Prices should be given to reward tangible achievements; not a lot of hot air.
The Nobel Price Committee should have held its horses until it was convinced of Obama’s capabilities to make this world a better place. It ought to be guided by deeds, not words.
This price has nothing to do with Obama. It is intended as a slap in Bush’s face.
The committee has shown its true colours. It is a political, biased and spiteful club.
Shame on it.

This is just bizarre. What a let-down of Nobel standards.

I dont thick Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Price.

Firstly, I'm not sure why Mother Teresa is such "questionable figure" - was she too lowly? And why is she the only example for the category "questionable figures"

What is also dubious is that although this award is made 9 months into Obama's presidency, the nomination came after only two weeks of his presidency! All he had done at that point was make his Cairo speach.

The irony of the finalist nominees is that at least two of them were able to engage their endeavours because the lay of the land in their countries had been changed by the actions of one despised man - George W Bush.

I said in 1992 after reading "Let my people Go", by Chief Albert Lutuli; Lutuli was the only person, together with Dag Hammarskjöld as well Martin Luther King, were the only people who received the Nobel Peace Prize on merit.

Nobel standards, as far as peace prize were concerned went down in the 1970s onwards when they gave the prize to Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Bishop Tutu in 1984. In the 1960s it was awarded to great individuals on merit.

I think Sechaba you are making a mockery of us Africans, one can understand you to mean, Africans reject this prize because they do not deserve it. I do not think President Obama does not deserve this prize, he deserves it 100%.

President Obama, in the few months in office, has done a lot towards world peace and people should understand that today’s globalised world is much more complex than that of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and other fellows.

Barack in the few months as President, he has:
1. Set up a team to close the Guantanamo prison meant for terrorists.
2. Cancelled the Anti-Ballistic Missile System which was to be positioned right at the door-step of Russia. Note: this was a source for US-Russia sour relations, divided Europe, might seduce Russia to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, etc.
3. Obama and Medvedev (President of Russia) want to reduce stockpiles of warheads to no more than 1,500 per side. It is said US has 5,600 and roughly 4,100 for Russia.

So giving this Nobel Peace prize to him is acknowledgement of the good work in the right direction and an encouragement to stick to his correct path. It looks like some of us do not see the looming 3rd world war and Obama has done a lot in resetting relations and promoting International diplomacy as stated in the article.

I think, he really deserves it but I do not trust him on the de-nuclearization as really to promote world peace other than to dis-arm US enemies. Nuclear is old technology for America, these guys are weaponizing the space by exploring ways and means of storing hi-tech weapons in the space.

So as they do this space weaponization programme, they want to dis-arm their enemies of nuclear weapons. We are headed to the age of real Star Wars.

Whilst I do not believe that President Obama is completely unworthy of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, I nevertheless feel that there is a more worthy individual - namely the Honourable Mr Morgan Tsvangirai, Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. My vote goes to this extraordinary man who has gone through so much, suffered so much and yet has persevered through peaceful means - and continues to do so - to do his utmost to bring Zimbabwe back from the brink. My admiration and prayers are for him, and for another Nobel Peace prize winner - Bishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. Perhaps we should establish our own illustrious African Peace Prize?????

I think it is quite a stretch to suggest that winning the prize at an early stage will be a hindrance to the work he's yet to do. I can find no rational basis on how you make that connection. The truth of the matter is that even Nelson Mandela won the prize before he was in office as president and before his good intentions were yet brought into fruition - South Africa is still not yet the society that the constitution envisages. But he had very good intentions; which Obama seems to also have in that he is keen to make the US what it once was and even better (which was temporarily lost due to Bush's lovely administration and his dealing with the war in Iraq and the passing of the Patriot Act and disregarding international law and the like - not to mention the stance of his daddy which seems to have been inherited by him).

Quote: I dont thick Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Price.

I think its by fare too early. It will be a burden to Obama for the rest of his time in office.

indeed de nobel prize is to early, dont think is the right choice but well what hapen happened will accept it as the way but he must not according to the nobel prize he must do what he promised to do, CHANGE ITS ALL WE NEED.

Peter Lauer- I agree, great man and great efforts in the planning but it is too early. What about Morgan Tsvangirai? Couldn't he have been a candidate?

This award is a symbolic of the worlds approval of the US change in direction taking after almost a decade of American belligerence, corruption and preemptive war. Awarding it now rather than later gives the world, especially Europe and the simmering Middle East cauldron, a heads up to support Obama or face the consequences of more wars and terrorism.

Adding to Mandla Hanise list, the impact of Obama's new direction:
- Has prevented bombs from raining down on Iran - since "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" was the tune being sung by his rival McCain. Imagine the millions of lives saved just by preventing this alone.
- Focused the war on terror on the terrorist support systems that provide refuge to these jihadists rather than open warfare that gives rise to so much collateral damage.
- Has served a great role model to kids across the world. Imagine after centuries of colonialism and slavery, who would have thought that the most powerful person on the planet would be black!
- Healed racial divisions in the US precipitated by the neo-cons in the Bush administration.

Judging from the comments here and in the US, many white SAns, like the neo-cons in the US, dislike what Obama represents, luckily their destructive influence is minimized since they've become such a fringe group in todays world.

The Nobel peace prize for the most part is a misnomer. It is really a political statement by and insular group of like minded people who pass themselves off as apolitical.

The fact that the nomination list was finalised a mere two weeks after Obama took office suggests that he made the list for reasons other than his achievement as president. How many gave him a chance to win the Democrat nomination when he entered the race? And how many really believed he could pull it through when the fight became in earnest? Beeing elected as head of state in a country still so divided along racial lines as the US constitutes in itself an achievment of great magnitude. His election shows that he succeeded in bringing people initially opposed to him to overcome their prejudice against African-American and to entrust him with the highest job in the land. As a representative of a minority so deeply wounded by its historical enslavement, Obama contributed with his victory to shaping Martin Luther King's "dream" into a more tangible reality than ever before on the world stage.

I confirm your statement Mr Harris and that of Mr Hanise he indeed deserve this Nobel Award.

I wonder whether anybody nominated George W Bush for the Nobel Prize for Peace as early as a fortnight after _his_ inauguration on 20 January 2001.

Still, let's trust that at the end of Barack Obama's first (or second?) four-year term as president of the USA the world will have seen that he fully deserved the ennoblement that five people meeting in Oslo were brave enough to bestow on him only nine months after his moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Question: How many days was Obama in office when nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize closed? Answer: 11 (Eleven). Question: What did he achieve in those eleven days to advance the cause of world peace to the extent he deserved nomination? Answer: Ummm ah..... hmmm.....

Final question: Having indicated he will accept the prize, how much integrity does Obama have?

The Nobel Price should have been shared between W Bush and B Obama –without the first, the latter’s chances would have been poor.

Obama should not have been nominated anyway. But there’s a good chance that he’d have made it in the NEXT awards.
So he’s been nominated and awarded not for what he HAS done, but rather for what he MAY DO in the future.

The selection committee simply applied new criteria. They may be right after all –but it creates a dubious precedent.

@Jacqueline Machabeis
Yes, I could not have expressed it better than you - Obama's election is an achievement in itself!!

Nobel instituted the prize to reward achievements, clearly not "Hope" and promises, give me a cent for every politician promise and I would be a millionaire. What good does closing Guantanamo if all you plan is a relocation of the prisioners stateside to inferior quality prisons? This is amateur hour for the USA and the rest of the world is enjoying it very much. This price was just a reward to the US for the kind of politician that the rest of the world like to see elected. Jimmy "the tyrant certifyier" Carter, Al "the internet inventor" Gore, and Barack "I toured the 53 states of the US" Obama, look it up it's pretty funny

Dave Harris i agree wit you about his election being an achievement but what has it got to do with World Peace?

I think Obama deserves it. Who else in the past 15 years has done as much to calm the increasingly choppy waters of Western-Arab relations? Just by saying things like "I'll talk to Iran", "we'll engage the Arab world" and the like, he has bridged what was beginning to look like a very dangerous gulf between the West and the Arab worlds. He has single-handedly changed the tone of international politics and quite probably saved a lot of lives in so doing.

@Clayton Majona
Learn to read. Figure it out, buddy!

It is the Prize that doesn't deserve Obama.
For sechaba what is the importance of the Prize for Africans anyway? The Nobel Prize is a Eurocentric prize. More than 90 per cent of Nobel laureates are Europeans or have European ancestry. That means according to the committee the rest of the world has contributed less than 10 per cent to the advancement of science techonlogy and peace since the establishment of the Prize in 1900s. The committee has invited high figure Obama as it did for a few people from other races and parts of the world to make the prize sound more international and universal. Whether the Prize is given to Obama or to someone else of sechabi's choice the Africans you are trumpeting about will see no changes in their lives. Don't try to be more African than the rest of us. We should not even care. Didn't the committee award the prize to Schockley, Watson or Naipaul who were more interested in attacking the intelligence of Africans than their discoveries?

@ Chris in CT - I think you're spot on! People misunderstand, but I guess there will always be dissent. Then again, I'm sure Obama does not care about anyone who does not believe he deserves the prize, he can internalise his own self-worth and he has his wife and Oprah to support him (LOL).
On a lighter note; Obama is not Bush and that in itself is quite an achievement worthy of the prize!

@Musha Liti
"Schockley, Watson or Naipaul who were more interested in attacking the intelligence of Africans"
I agree some of these recipients lacked basic humanity but remember this is sometimes the price we pay as a society for raising geniuses - sometimes they do not develop fully as human beings. Lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Obama is treated like a holywood star. what's with the red carpets and "awards" he gets all the time?
World please give the guy some time to prove himself.