Of UN Secretaries-General and Nobel Peace Prizes

Myint Zan School of Social and Economic Development University of the South Pacific Suva, Fiji Islands

In its 100th year, the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize has "jointly" been awarded to Kofi Annan, the seventh and current Secretary- General of the United Nations and the UN organization as a whole. This is the first time in history that an incumbent UN Secretary- General has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 1961 within weeks after his tragic death in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (as it then was called ) on Sept. 17, 1961.

A few weeks later U Thant was elected to fill in Hammarskjold's post when the UN General Assembly, unanimously, elected U Thant as "acting Secretary-General".

U Thant served in that post with distinction for 10 long years. until he retired in 1971, after repeatedly declining to serve a third term.

In late September to early October 1965, U Thant was seriously considered by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for its 1965 Nobel Peace Prize, as indicated in his memoirs, View From the UN (1978).

Ultimately it was the UNICEF who was the recipient of the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize. U Thant was considered for the Prize mainly due to his, what nowadays would be called, shuttle mission to Islamabad and New Delhi to broker a cease-fire agreement between Pakistan and India, after the 1965 Kashmir war broke out.

Deliberations or the reasons of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for preferring one candidate over another has reportedly been "classified information" for 50 years. But U Thant himself might have proffered a reason in his memoirs. He wrote that when the Norwegian Permanent Representative informed him that "it was the intention" of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to award him the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize, his first thought was to think of persons who were more deserving of the Peace Prize than him. He wrote, "Isn't striving for peace a job of the UN Secretary-General?"

More than three and a half years ago it was said that Annan should be or could be awarded the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for his mission to Baghdad where he secured Saddam Hussein's temporary compliance with UN resolutions some reports in the West stated that Annan could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

That given his job to strive for peace, any award for a UN Secretary-General should be awarded after retirement, so that his contributions can be accessed in perspective.

A day before the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize was announced the BBC reported that at times, the Nobel Peace Prize was known more for those who did not get the prize than those who did get it. The broadcast singled out Mahatama Gandhi as among those who did not receive the Nobel pace prize.

In recent times the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to such moral giants or at least stalwarts like Martin Luther King Jr (1964), Mother Teresa (1979), Nelson Mandela (1993), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), with the exception of Sweden whose "son" Dag Hammarskjold was both a UN Secretary General and a Nobel Peace Laureate.

Still, one wonders about the logic and justification for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to such persons like Henry Kissinger (1973) in comparison to, say, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter or former Philippines president Corazon Aquino.

Kofi Annan is a decent, hardworking, skilful and distinguished international civil servant who does not need the additional honor of the Nobel Peace Prize. Now that the additional honor is bestowed on him and the UN, one can only wish both the UN and its chief well in their efforts to make this "messy world", as Annan said, a better place to live in.