President 'surprised' by peace award
Updated on 09 October 2009
The pre-dawn call telling the US president he had won the Nobel Prize for Peace stunned everyone, including Barack Obama and his most senior aides. Sarah Smith reports.
The Norwegian prize committee said it was bestowing the honour for Obama's push for nuclear disarmament and peace in the Middle East.
Mr Obama said he would accept the award as a "call to action".
But critics called it "premature" and an "embarrassment" for a man whose troops are fighting two wars - and who has been in office less than a year.
The first African American to hold the country's highest office, Obama has called for disarmament and worked to restart the stalled Middle East peace process since taking office in January. Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to him today for giving the world "hope for a better future."
The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".
"Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said in a citation.
It awarded the prize to Obama less than nine months into his presidency. Despite setting out an ambitious international agenda, he has yet to score any breakthrough on the Middle East or Iran's nuclear programme, and faces difficult choices on the conduct of the war in Afghanistan.
Last month Obama chaired a historic meeting of the United Nations Security Council, which unanimously approved a US-drafted resolution calling on nuclear weapons states to scrap their arsenals.
Obama is the third senior U.S. Democrat to win the prize this decade after former Vice President Al Gore won in 2007 along with the U.N. climate panel and Jimmy Carter in 2002.
The prize worth 10m Swedish crowns ($1.4m) will be handed over in Oslo on 10 December.
Reaction around the world to the award was mixed. A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told Reuters that “Obama should have won the ‘Nobel prize for escalating violence and killing civilians’.”
Elsewhere the reaction was more positive. Japan’s President Hatoyama and Germany’s Chancellor Merkel both said the award of the prize to Barack Obama should encourage everyone to him him rid the world of nuclear weapons.
In the Middle East, chief Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat said the award could be a good omen for the region.
“We hope that he will be able to achieve peace in the Middle East and achieve Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders and establish an independent Palestinian state,” he said.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak told army radio the prize should enhance Obama's ability "to contribute to establishing regional peace in the Middle East”.
But Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas prime minister in the Gaza Strip, told reporters: “Unless real and deep-rooted change is made in American policy towards recognising the rights of the Palestinian people, I would think such a prize would be useless.”
Channel 4 News chief writer Felicity Spector writes -
Well, he's been in office less than a year but Barack Obama has already won the Nobel prize for peace, beating off competition from more than 200 nominees, including a hotly tipped Afghan human rights activist, a Chinese dissident and an 80-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk.
He was by no means the favourite - indeed, his odds of winning were on a par with former US President Bill Clinton at 14/1.
In their citation this morning, the Norwegian-based committee said Obama had won the prize for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples.
Rarely, they went on, has someone given the world's people "a hope for a better future".
Former presidenital candidate Al Gore, who won the laureate two years ago for his environmental campaigning, wanted his award to "elevate global consciousness" about the threat of climate change, and he has doggedly pursued his cause: even George W Bush claimed to be "happy" about his erstwhile rival winning the accolade.
But then Henry Kissinger took the prize back in 1972, despite presiding over the carpet-bombing of Cambodia. And Jimmy Carter won it for trying - as the committee put it in 2002, "for decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts".
Today, Obama's got way more to prove, beyond a nice diploma to hang on the Oval Office wall and a handy one and a half million bucks to go alongside. As serving president of the most powerful country on earth, he's got real capacity to achieve change - or be frustrated by the harsh realities of political compromise.
Obama supporters might see the award as an unconscious echo of that fictional liberal hero, the West Wing's Josiah Bartlett: Hollywood's dream president, a true renaissance man who came complete with a Nobel prize for economics.
But more importantly, it crowns Obama's image as the man who personifies a new era in America politics: one nation coming together, one nation which dared to dream of hope, and the man who made it happen.
All Obama has to do now is rid the world of nuclear weapons, and bring about peace in the Middle East. All this when the ink is barely dry on his inaugural address.
Wow. No high expectations there, then.
