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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Irony: Nobel Peace Prize winners who went to war!

Irony is the number of recent Nobel prize winners that went to war! Under President Obama more drone strikes happened in Pakistan than happened before him or after him!

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize — has ordered a military offensive on the northern Tigray region of the country.

Ahmed, who won for ending the 20-year conflict with Eritrea, is far from the first peace prize laureate to later wage or support war.

Barack Obama

The first black US president got the prize only nine months after his inauguration in 2009.

But far from ending America’s foreign wars, as he said he hoped to do, they continued for all eight years of his term, with airstrikes or military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Read more: Who, How & How much of the Nobel Prize

Aung San Suu Kyi

The reputation of Myanmar’s leader has been left in tatters with the country accused of the ethnic cleansing of Muslim Rohingyas and trampling on the rights of other minorities.

The 1991 laureate, who won the prize for her heroic resistance to the country’s military, now rules in an uneasy power-sharing agreement with them.

Myanmar has been fighting several internal independence movements for decades in what is thought to be the world’s longest ongoing civil war.

Henry Kissinger

Eyebrows were raised in 1973 when the Cold War warrior Secretary of State shared the prize with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho for negotiating ceasefires that didn’t hold. The war rumbled on for two more years.

Le Duc Tho refused his half of the prize while critics said the award “made political satire obsolete” given Kissinger’s role in the carpet bombing of Cambodia and Operation Condor killings to keep pro-US South American dictators in power.

Read more: Why you must read Henry Kissinger’s “World Order”?

Ernesto Moneta

The Italian pacifist supported Rome’s war with the Ottoman Empire in 1911 and its conquest of what is now Libya, only four years after winning the Nobel.

The former soldier, who also fought with nationalist general Giuseppe Garibaldi, went on to back Italy’s entry into World War I in 1915.

Theodore Roosevelt

The then US president won in 1906 for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese war a year earlier.

Read more: Ethiopia PM Abiy wins Nobel Peace Prize for mending ties with Eritrea

But even at the time, the nomination of the “military mad” leader of the “Rough Riders” volunteer cavalry regiment in the Spanish-American war, was disputed, with Swedish newspapers saying Alfred Nobel would be spinning in his grave.

AFP with additional input by GVS News desk