US President Barack Obama's Nobel peace prize ‘mistake’: Nobel committee ex-secretary
Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama in 2009 was a “mistake” and it failed to achieve the intended goals of promoting global peace, according to the former secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee which awards the peace prize.
"Even many of Obama's supporters thought the prize was a mistake," Geir Lundestad writes in a book released on Thursday.
Lundestad explains that it became impossible for the US president to live up to the high expectations placed upon him by the committee.
"In that sense the committee didn't achieve what it had hoped for,” Lundestad wrote in excerpts of the book read by The Associated Press.
Lundestad was director of the secretive Norwegian Nobel Institute from 1990-2015. He attended committee meetings but had no vote.
Lundestad, currently a professor of international history at the University of Oslo, said he had strong doubts before the prize was awarded to Obama.
The award, which came just nine months after Obama became president, was widely criticized in the United States and rest of the world. Political commentators described the peace prize as premature because Obama had not accomplished much at the time.
Obama may be one of the most controversial recent winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, but he is not the first. The prize has, for most of its history, been the subject of controversies due to its political nature.
Some scholars have suggested that to award a peace prize on the basis of unquantifiable contemporary opinion is unjust and flawed, especially as many of the committee members are not impartial observers.
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