These are interesting times in the different geopolitical theatres. In the decade that has gone by, there have been momentous churnings, shaking up or plunging several countries, weak and strong alike, into the political furnaces. In many of them, regimes have fallen, leaving the field open for new players. In India’s immediate neighbourhood, political mayhems have been witnessed in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In the former three, regimes which were already weakened by internal crises resulting out of mismanagement and corruption, have had to vacate their seats of power in the face of civil uprisings. In Myanmar, the country’s military forcefully uprooted the legitimately elected democratic government headed by the National League for Democracy, NLD, and still holds on to power and seems to be having the upper hand for many different reasons, including big power interest in the country, particular that of China. In what has been generally termed as a farce, the military junta is now in the process of holding election to transition power to a democratically elected government again, which many predict can be no more than its proxy.
The current wave of political churnings have not spared other regions in the world too. Civil war in Syria, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provoked by NATO’s bid to expand into Ukraine, Israel’s flattening of Gaza in response to a Hamas attack on its soil, the abduction of Venezuelan president by the US under the directive of President Donald Trump, and the latter’s threat to annex Greenland are some evidences of this. But there are many more, the most engaging of which is the civil unrest in Iran seeking to uproot the Islamic republic to reinstall monarchic rule led by the exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi son of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi whose reign was cut short by the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution, to usher in an Islamic rule under Ayatollah Khomeini. Besides their internal political rivalries and frictions, all of these are loaded with international intrigues played by Western powers, in particular the USA too.
While the inevitability of this game of power is a reality, as predicted by the international political school of thought of “realism”, what is now more than evident is the invisible or concealed politics of so called respected international institutions meant precisely to standardise international rule of law and promote respect of a rule-based internation order. Most, including the International Monitory Fund, IMF, World Trade Organisation, WTO, and even venerated institutions like the Nobel Peace Committee, have all shown their inclination to equate democracy and humanity to how the Capitalist West define these values, therefore push this brand of democracy and humanism as well. While the West-centric views of post Second World War organisations such as IMF and WTO have been subjects of much debates, what is increasingly becoming outrageous is the controversial façade the Nobel Peace Prize which is revealing itself.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado, the exiled opposition leader from Venezuela, has made this stark. Machado has been openly supportive of Israel’s Zionistic policies but even if this is to be considered her freedom of choice, she has also been campaigning for the United States to intervene and bring down her country’s socialist government to facilitate her assumption of power in her country. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year for her courage in fighting the authoritarian socialist government in her country. Much to the embarrassment of the Nobel Peace Committee, and the outrage of the rest of the sane world, she has now shown her true colours and gone to the limit of gifting her Nobel Peace Prize to the President of the US, Donald Trump, in the hope that she will be installed as President of Venezuela, replacing the socialist President, Nicolás Maduro who had only a fortnight ago been atrociously abducted from his country by US in a special operation.
The Nobel Peace Committee is now on the defensive saying that the Nobel Peace Prize they awarded her cannot be transferred. But the question is, why was she chosen for the award at all in the first place. Is it enough for someone to oppose socialist regimes to win the Nobel Peace Prize. To be a little charitable, let it be assumed that she was given the prize for her defence of freedom of thought and expression in a regime that is alleged to have repressed these. But if this were to be so, why were Western whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning etc., who exposed the curtailment of these freedom in the countries they belonged, not also according the same honour. It is presumable if these whistle blowers, who have had to face grave consequences in their countries, belonged to non-Western countries deemed the rival powers of the West such as Russia, China, Iran, Cuba or even India, and they were detractors there, they would have in all likelihood received the Nobel Peace Prize too.
In the not-so-distant past, the Nobel Peace Prize has been criticised for similarly pushing Western Capitalist hegemony. As for instance, somebody who is recognized as a notorious war monger, especially while the Vietnam war lasted, former Secretary of State and then National Security Advisor of the US, Henry Kissinger too received this prize, prompting even American newspapers such as the New York Times to dismiss this prize as a Nobel War Prize. Kissinger, it may be recalled, concealed the Pentagon Papers, a study which concluded that the Vietnam War could not be won, so that the war continued. Only when the Pentagon Papers leaked to the media, the US government became compelled begin the process of withdrawing from Vietnam and thus end the war.
Similarly, the Nobel Peace Committee received a bad jolt when Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, another personality they decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for her opposition the military junta in her country, defended the Rohingya persecution (genocide) in her country at the International Court of Justice, ICJ, in December 2019 where Gambia had filed a genocide case against her country. This had resulted in a huge international outcry to revoke her Nobel Peace Prize.
If the committee has been criticised for the choices it has made, making it seem overtly biased in favour of Western Capitalism, some deliberate omissions it has made in the past have also exposed this same bias. The most prominent of these omissions is that of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who had been nominated five times for the prize but was rejected each time. The committee did apologise and admit this was a mistake in 1989, and said the award of the Prize to the Dalai Lama in that year was also a belated tribute to Gandhi. The truth is Gandhi’s struggle was against a Western power, and the Dalai Lama’s was against China, a country which is not only Communist, but also seen as a rival of Western powers.
If not for all that has happened in its history, at least for the disgrace this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner has brought to the institution’s reputation, the Nobel Peace Committee, should hang their heads in shame and admit to their inherent bias.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
