Obama: No laurels to rest on yet

By Conway Tutani 16/10/2009

THIS year’s Nobel Peace laureate is none other than United States President Barack Hussein Obama. Not for the first time, the Nobel Committee has made an unexpected and surprising choice.

Nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize closed barely a week after Obama was sworn as President in January and he went on to win the prize after barely 10 months in office. What could have motivated the choice?
This decision appears to be based merely on the strength of his promise, high as it appears to be.
Obama is less than a year into a presidency which could run to eight years, that is if he stands for and wins a second term — the statutory limit in the US.
Was the award premature? What if he doesn’t live up to his highly promising start?
It’s also possible that the weight of expectations could overwhelm him and the medal will hang around his neck like an albatross.
Conventional wisdom says such recognition should be bestowed on the strength of sustained or consistent past achievement; that is the natural inclination of human thought.
A committee of five people elected by the Norwegian Parliament awards the Peace Prize.
Unlike the other Nobel prizes, which recognise completed scientific or literary achievement, it has been seen fit to award the Nobel Peace Prize to persons or organisations that are in the process of resolving a conflict or creating peace.
Unlike the scientific and literary Nobel prizes, usually awarded two or three decades after the achievement, the Peace Prize has been awarded for more recent or immediate achievements.
Some commentators have suggested that to award the prize on the basis of the politics of the day jeopardises credibility and fairness because many of the judges themselves cannot be said to be impartial observers or adjudicators.
According to the will of Swedish industrialist, inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), who bequeathed all the Nobel prizes, the Peace Prize should be awarded to the person who, "during the preceding year . . . 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 of peace congresses".
The will was written in a different historical period when Europe was being torn apart by internecine violent strife as arms of war became more sophisticated and destructive and European nations were, in some instances genocidically, carving out colonies for themselves as backyards for imperialistic exploitation.
Thus, the Peace Prize was founded on Eurocentric principles and values.
However, since the first award in 1901, the criterion has over the years evolved to make it relevant to changed and changing circumstances, as opposed to a "living will" (a semantic misnomer), which allows a person to express his desire not to be kept alive through artificial or extraordinary means if in future he suffers from an incurable and terminal condition.
(If the writer may digress a bit, as a consequence of the current global financial meltdown, some economic experts have suggested that companies be required to write "living wills" so that governments won’t be obliged to bail them out with taxpayers’ money; the purpose being to make them responsible for their sins of commission or omission without burdening the nation and making everyone suffer.)
That is why it took another 49 years to have the first black Nobel Peace Prize winner.
African American Ralph Blunche, who won in 1950, broke many colour barriers when, as a United Nations diplomat, he mediated in some of the most difficult and strife-ridden international conflicts of his day, including the Middle East cauldron.
The Detroit-born son of a barber sold newspapers as a child and worked as a houseboy in Los Angeles. He was recognised early on for his brilliance, winning a scholarship to Harvard University, which was supplemented by a US$1 000 fund raised by the African American community in his hometown of LA. He completed a doctorate at Harvard several years later with a focus on social science and anthropology in Africa.
A brilliant academic and diplomat and lifelong activist in civil rights, Blunche was instrumental in negotiations in 1948 between the newly formed State of Israel and neighbouring hostile Arab states. He subsequently spent a long career at the United Nations, culminating in 15 years as Under-Secretary General, the highest post ever held by an American.
In a speech announcing Blunche as winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee quoted from his own writings.
Describing having suffered many "disillusioning experiences", Blunche wrote: "Like every Negro (the disparaging term then used in reference to blacks) in America, I have been buffeted about a great deal, I have become allergic to prejudice. On the other hand, from my earliest years, I was taught the virtues of tolerance: militancy in fighting for rights — but not bitterness."
Blunche goes on to say that in becoming a social scientist, he developed a professional demeanour of "coolness of temper, an attitude of objectivity when dealing with human sensitivities and irrationalities", that, he said, was "invaluable".
In the following years, the then UN Secretary-General U Thant described Blunche as "an international institution in his own right, transcending both nationality and race in a way that is achieved by very few".
Unlike Obama, he operated under a much more odious racist system, but he still made his mark.
Obama’s zeal to uplift the underdog and broadness of mind can be traced to his own painful childhood. His father abandoned the family when he was only two years old. He idolised his father (who was a goat herder as a boy). Both studied at Harvard, but Obama senior died in poverty, an alcoholic and abusive character who failed to fulfil his personal ambitions and family obligations.
According to the Nobel Committee, Obama, the first African American US President, won the Peace Prize for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples". The committee highlighted Obama’s efforts to support international bodies such as the United Nations and promote nuclear disarmament through talks with, among other states, Russia, the power behind the former Soviet Union, America’s bitterest foe during the Cold War era, when both countries faced off in a state of mutual hostility and balance of fear which threatened the very existence of the earth through an atomic holocaust.
It may be easy to explain the Nobel Committee’s decision going by the messy state his predecessor George W. Bush left the world in after eight years in power.
Obama has changed the language and tone of international politics.
He has recognised that the US can no longer posture as the world’s policeman; he has clearly read the signs that the US cannot go it alone in an interconnected and interdependent world. His agenda has, ironically, been strengthened by the global financial meltdown, which began last September under Bush’s watch.
The highly damaging effects of Bush’s economic conservatism at home and political/military adventurism abroad are what Obama is trying to repair. Under Bush, the most powerful nation on earth had become the biggest international outlaw, routinely ignoring and bypassing international institutions, thus endangering world peace and security. Bush, under the banner of freedom, invaded Iraq in 2003 in total disregard of the UN and against the stern advice of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. What freedom? Iraq continues to bleed today – and heavily. Not to mention the Guantanamo prison torture scandal which has robbed the US its voice over human rights.
In the aftermath of the global financial meltdown, Obama has boldly identified bankers who caused the crisis in the first place and are now reaping from it after taxpayer-funded bailouts as modern-day robber barons that they are and that is why he is pushing for a global solution to this political and economic skulduggery where there is no difference between political capital and economic capital.
Thus, this year’s award has been presented to Obama as a pointer.
Obama himself has acknowledged as much by describing the award as "a call to action", because he couldn’t have achieved much on the ground after only nine months in office, except perhaps on the domestic policy front, where his biggest project so far — an expanded health care plan to cover about 50 million Americans who have no medical aid in the richest country on the globe — has just been passed by the Senate Finance Committee. But there is still a lot of haggling to come in the full Senate and House of Representatives before it becomes law.
During his visit of self-discovery to Kenya as a 26-year-old in 1987, Obama met his large extended family; he saw first-hand the corruption and tribal tensions riddling Kenyan politics; he saw parallels between black Americans in Chicago ghettos and Kenyans living in squalid Nairobi shanty towns, and — most importantly — the still pervasive destructive socio-economic effects of British colonialism 24 years after Kenya’s independence in 1963.
He should realise that today — 22 years later — these deep-seated effects of colonial dispossession and dislocation are still being felt continent-wide. Denialism regarding such is a misreading of Africa’s painful history.
It is with this in mind that Africans, while fully cognisant that he is the President of the US — not Africa — expect him to deal with Africa understandingly and fairly, and not repeat canards of a dark, hopeless continent.
He does not have any laurels to rest on yet.
l conway.tutani@zimpapers.co.zw