Thorbjoern Jagland, who was Norwegian prime minister from 1996-97, was recently demoted as the chairman of Nobel Peace Prize committee – the first time in the 114-year history of the award a chairmen was relegated. Kaci Kullmann Five, a former leader of Norway’s ruling Conservative Party, took over the reins from Jagland who spent 6 years at the helm. Jagland will remain a committee member.
Declining to explain the controversial decision, Five said, “The committee chooses a leader every year. This year is a new committee. Jagland has been a good leader for six years”.
Jagland is also head of the 47-nation Council of Europe and a few right-wing parliamentarians believe that amounts to a conflict of interest in deciding the $1 million Nobel Prize.
Others see the decision to remove him from the chairmanship as a measure to reconcile with China which froze top-level diplomatic relations with Norway, imposed visa restrictions and banned salmon imports, a valuable industry for the Scandinavian nation, after Liu was awarded the Prize.
Shift in Norwegian politics may also be a factor behind the unprecedented move. The committee is appointed in line with the strength of parties in Norway’s parliament. In the 2013 general elections, the right-wing Conservatives ousted left-wing Labour Party.
Right-wing parties were critical of Jagland, from Labour Party, for awarding the prize to Barack Obama in 2009, to Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010, and to the European Union in 2012.
The move to award Obama stunned the world as he had been in office less than nine months and the US was waging simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The committee drew Beijing’s ire for handing the prize to jailed Chinese dissident Xiaobo. The European Union was handed the Prize for its commitment to “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”. “The EU is clearly not the ‘champion of peace’ that Alfred Nobel had in mind when he wrote his will,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in an open letter with two other former laureates.
The big question, however, is: After the historical decision, will the Nobel committee remain as independent of a political point of view as it should be?
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