(Continued from Part 1)
Menachem Begin, joint winner of the 1978 Peace Prize was, from 1944 to 1948, commander-in-chief of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which employed ferocious terror tactics against Arab civilians. In April 1948, for example, Begin's gang attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, and massacred 250 civilians, including many women and children. Nor did he lose his taste for violence even after he won the Nobel. Within four years, he launched an invasion of Lebanon that culminated in the massacres of at least 700 civilians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. His immediate reaction to this savagery was given in an interview in which he denied all responsibility: "Goyim kill goyim and they immediately come to hang the Jews."
As President of Egypt, Begin's cowinner, Anwar al-Sadat, launched the bloody Yom Kippur War against Israel in 1973. His government's human rights record towards its own citizens was terrible, with torture and arbitrary detention commonplace. Other winners of the peace prize in recent decades include Yasser Arafat, who was for many years leader of the Fatah organisation which carried out many attacks against Jewish and Lebanese civilians, the former president of South Africa F.W. de Klerk, who recently went to court to force his country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to remove from its reports allegations that he had knowledge of some atrocities against opponents of apartheid, and the Irish laureate Sean McBride who, as well as his great achievement in helping to found Amnesty International, had been, earlier in his career, chief-of-staff of the IRA.
Most bizarre of all is the fact that Henry Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize in 1973 (his co- nominee Le Duc Tho, with whom he had negotiated a peace accord that did not, in fact, bring peace to Vietnam, had the grace to decline the award). Kissinger's record as national security adviser and then secretary of state to Richard Nixon includes key roles in the prosecution and prolongation of the war in Vietnam, the catastrophic decision to carpet-bomb Cambodia which caused thousands of deaths directly and indirectly led to the coming to power of the murderous Pol Pot regime, the propping up of grisly dictators around the world and the planning and funding of General Pinochet's coup in Chile.
Recently-released papers show his office was informed that the Pinochet regime was about to murder the former Chilean foreign minister right in the heart of Washington and did nothing to stop the killing. It is noticeable that, presumably in the hope of avoiding such ironies, the Nobel peace prize committee has tended in recent years to award the prize to humanitarian organisations rather than to powerful politicians. In the last two decades the prize has gone to such collective bodies as the United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
Yet even when the prize has gone to deserving humanitarian organisations, it has sometimes done them as much harm as good. The sudden descent of fame and money on idealists who have been used to working against the odds can create unbearable strains. Last year's winners, the Campaign to Ban Landmines, promptly descended into a round of personality clashes and resentment of the prominence given to one of its leaders, Jody Williams. Closer to home, the Peace People in Northern Ireland were torn apart by the award of the 1976 prize to its founders, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan. Yet, there are signs that the Nobel prizes are becoming more meaningful. The literature prizes, once the preserve of a very narrow range of European and American writers, do now honour great writers from a wide range of international cultures. The decision to award this year's economics prize to Amartya Sen for revolutionising our understanding of famines, rather than to someone who devised a new mathematical tool for investment bankers, may indicate a similar change of perspective.
The peace prize, which was until 1960 the almost exclusive preserve of the great and the good in north America and western Europe, has slowly begun to reflect a wider world. The role of women as defenders of human rights has also been increasingly acknowledged: whereas in the first 45 years of the peace prize only three went to women, four women have won it in the 1990s. And some of the peace prizes awarded in this decade, such as those given to the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the Guatemalan campaigner Rigoberta Menchu and the East Timorese leaders Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta, have been genuine attempts to intervene on the side of the weak against the strong. Next week, when David Trimble and John Hume collect their awards, Irish people will have a very special reason to hope that the record of the Nobel committee in picking deserving winners really has improved.