A “highly symbolic” Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded this year in a context of war and multiple crises. On Friday, October 7, the Prize was awarded to a trio of representatives of civil society in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, the main actors in the Ukrainian conflict. The award was jointly attributed to the Belarusian activist Ales Beliatski (still in prison in his country), the Russian NGO Memorial (struck by a dissolution order from the Russian authorities), and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.
“The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honor three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy, and peaceful coexistence in the three neighboring countries of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine”, indicated Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Nobel Committee. The five members of the Nobel committee were careful not to directly criticize Vladimir Putin, who had launched the invasion of his Ukrainian neighbor on February 24th. Out of coincidence, the Russian president celebrated his 70th birthday on the same day. Questioned by the foreign press, Ms. Reiss-Andersen affirmed that the “prize was not directed against Putin but that his authoritarian regime, like that of Belarus, should stop repressing human rights activists…”.
In the process, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, welcomed the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to this trio. “The Nobel Peace Committee recognized the exceptional courage of the women and men who oppose autocracy”, she tweeted. “They show the real power of civil society in the struggle for democracy”, she added.
No less than 343 candidates were running this year for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The 2022 season
On Monday October 3, the Nobel Prize for Medicine went to the pioneer of paleogenomics, the Swede Svante Pääbo, for the complete sequencing of the genome of Neanderthal man and the foundation of this discipline which explores DNA from the dawn of time to shed light on today’s human genes. The Physics Prize awarded on Tuesday to the French scientist Alain Aspect, the Austrian Anton Zeilinger, and to the American John Clauser for their discoveries on the revolutionary mechanism of “quantum entanglement”, proving Albert Einstein himself wrong about this improbable phenomenon of quantum mechanics. On Wednesday, it was a trio, made up of the Americans Carolyn Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless together with the Dane Morten Meldal, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for “the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”. And on Thursday, Annie Ernaux, author in particular of “Empty cabinets” and “The years”, became the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, after 15 men. The Nobel season ended on Monday, October 10 with the Economics Prize, added in 1969 to the five traditional prizes provided for in Alfred Nobel’s will.
Fatim-Zohra Tohry
