Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will established a prize for “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” The prize was first awarded in 1901.
One person, the Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho, has declined the prize. Three winners — the German pacifist and journalist Carl von Ossietzky, the Burmese politician Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo — were under arrest at the time of the award. There has been one posthumous prize, in 1961, to the United Nations secretary general, Dag Hammarskjold, who died in a plane crash that year.
WNU Editor: I groaned when Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the prize in 1990. The person who should have been awarded that prize (or at least with Gorbachev) was President Reagan .... but I guess for the Nobel Committee that was a bridge too far. Another person who should have been awarded the prize was John Paul II and the significant role that he played in bringing down the Communist regimes in eastern Europe .... again .... I guess his conservative religious beliefs was something that the Nobel Committee could not digest.
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