Tidligere australsk utenriksminister kaller Jagland en uhelbredelig tulling og mener Obama bør si nei til Nobelprisen.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,26196226-5006301,00.html
Kronikk ved Alexander Downer her - hans oppfatning av Jagland er mildt sagt oppsiktsvekkende:
By ALEXANDER DOWNER
October 12, 2009 09:30am
SELECTING President Barack Obama for the Peace Prize was a political decision of gross stupidity.
WHEN I heard Barack Obama had won this year's Nobel Prize for Peace I was sitting at a meeting with an African friend. He is pretty left wing by any standards and loves Barack Obama.
He turned to me and said, sotto voce, "patronising, very patronising". I thought the decision was really dumb and discredited, maybe fatally, but I asked my friend what he meant. He screwed up his face and said bitterly: "He only won the prize because he's an African-American".
That may be part of the explanation. Barack Obama was nominated after he had been in office for just 11 weeks. Even now, he only has served as President of the U.S. for 8 1/2 months and has not had anything like enough time for his policies to bear fruit.
This was a very bad decision and Barack Obama should have been man enough to refuse the prize. If he had, he would have helped preserve the integrity of the Nobel Peace Prize and also demonstrate a disarming degree of modesty.
How could he have snatched the prize from such people as the great Zimbabwean humanitarian and champion of freedom, Morgan Tsvangiri, or the renowned Greg Mortenson, a former U.S. Army doctor who has set up schools for girls in tough, Taliban-dominated areas of Afghanistan.
These people are real heroes; brave, decent, effective and modest contributors to a better world.
Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba, who mediated to end the civil war in Colombia, apparently was nominated, too. But he is not on TV every night so he cannot get it.
This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been a hideous display of cynical politics. The blame does not all lie at President Obama's feet. He was, after all, offered the prize by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.
The Peace Prize process is very different from the procedures used for other Nobel prizes, such as medicine and literature. They are decided by professional academicians but the Peace Prize is awarded by a small committee of Norwegian politicians. That is quite a problem. At the time Alfred Nobel, the Swede who invented dynamite, set up his prizes, Norway was in a political union with Sweden and apparently Mr Nobel thought Norwegian politicians were less corrupt and more humane and visionary than their Swedish counterparts so he determined the Norwegian Parliament should set up a committee and choose the winner.
They have come up with some odd results. Mahatma Gandhi - the father of peaceful protest to free hundreds of millions of people from colonialism - did not win them over. He was not worth it, apparently.
Nor was Winston Churchill who, with his brave people, held out alone in Europe against the Nazis in 1940 and much of 1941 and with Roosevelt, Truman and Stalin won World War II.
Then there was the Cold War. The two heroes who finally brought the curtain down on that were Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan. Not them either, apparently.
To be fair, some Nobel Laureates have deserved the honour. Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, who led the women's peace marches in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, were worthy winners.
So were Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk. A great favourite of mine, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was an excellent choice in 1991 as was Lech Walesa in 1983. But Barack Obama after just nine months in the job?
So who exactly is on this committee which selects the Nobel Prize for Peace?
There are five Norwegian MPs on the committee, three from the left and two from the right. There is a woman called Sissel Ronbeck, who is a Labour MP. In her earlier years she was the chairman of the Norwegian Workers Youth League. Then there is Ms Agot Valle, of the Socialist Left Party. There is a Conservative and a member of the libertarian Progress Party. And then there's the chairman, the most important of all the members of the committee. He is a man called Thorbjorn Jagland.
Mr Jagland was once prime minister of Norway and became the foreign minister. He is a member of the Norwegian Labour Party.
In 2001, you will recall there was a standoff between the Australian Government and a Norwegian ship, the Tampa. The Tampa had picked up several people who were trying to get to Australia from Indonesia. The Government told the Tampa it had to take the people to Indonesia, that is, back to where they came from. The ship's captain, on instructions from Norway's then government, said it would not. They had to land in Australia.
One cold Canberra night I was snug in bed when my phone rang at 2am. It was foreign minister Jagland. I politely told him it was a little late for me although, no doubt, a pleasant early evening in Oslo. He started shouting. He hardly needed a phone from Norway. He "ordered" me to accept the ship into an Australian port. I politely explained our policy about stopping people smugglers and said the asylum seekers would be safe in Indonesia where they would be processed by the UNHCR. Not good enough, he yelled. The Tampa was going to land them in Australia. I told him it was not. It did not.
This Thorbjorn Jagland was a real party-political player. He was Labour, we were Liberal. He good, we bad. What a surprise; the same man has made the worst decision in Nobel Peace Prize history as he hated George W. Bush and Barack Obama is an African-American. He has done real damage to the institution. You cannot help a fool.
* Alexander Downer was Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1996 to 2007.
