Before Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and maker of armaments, left the world, he thought of honouring those who make peace, not war. The Nobel Peace Prize has had a chequered history since then. The subject probably got more convoluted most recently when a Nobel laureate in Barack Obama (2009), as Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces, bombed another, Médecins Sans Frontières (1999), in an Afghan war-zone hospital. Do we blame the secretive Norwegian selection committee or simply a world so full of violence? Reminders of where we stand as a collective civilisation is to be seen in the choices for the Nobel Peace and Literature Prizes.
Popular choices, like Angela Merkel and the Pope, tipped for the Peace Nobel were blown aside when the committee revealed the winner as the National Dialogue Quartet of Tunisia, a collective of lawyers, trade unions and human rights activists credited with saving Tunisia from civil war. But if we went back we would find that a humble apple-seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, who self-immolated after his wares were confiscated by a municipal inspector in 2010, was the catalyst who brought together so many groups and began the Tunisian Revolution, triggering the Arab Spring.
Would Bouazizi, who symbolised civic protest even if in an extreme form, have been a better choice if not for his taking his own life? There is so much to ponder over, more so since the Literature Nobel went to the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich, a writer who reminded the world of the horrors of war by writing a “monument to suffering and courage”. Appropriate, considering the violent times.
