Nobel official says peace prize is no magic wand

unday December 9, 10:10 AM



OSLO (Reuters) - The Nobel Peace Prize has occasionally affected
world events, but it is more of a microphone to broadcast the views
of the winner than a magic wand to change things, a senior Nobel official said.

Geir Lundestad, head of the Nobel Institute in Oslo and secretary to
the Norwegian committee that selects the laureates, said the peace
prize could open many doors, but it only rarely enabled the winners
to change the world.

"The prize is primarily a high honor," Lundestad told reporters
during a recent visit to the Institute. "It also acts as a
loudspeaker and a microphone for the lesser-known laureates."


"It can obviously not produce peace. It is no magic wand -- that goes
without saying," he said.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore will receive the Nobel Peace Prize
in the Norwegian capital on Monday with the U.N. Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Announced in October, the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.55 million)
award went to them for spreading public awareness and furthering the
science of climate change.

Gore and IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri will receive the prize while
governments are convened at a U.N. climate conference in Bali,
Indonesia, to try to launch negotiations for a treaty to succeed the
Kyoto protocol curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Gore said upon arriving in Oslo on Friday, that if the prize helped
further those talks, it would be a good thing.

The peace prize has sometimes offered protection to the winners
against their countries' rulers, as noted by the 1983 laureate Lech
Walesa of Poland and the Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov
who got the prize in 1975.

"It also opens virtually all doors," Lundestad said, citing the
example of South African Bishop Desmond Tutu who was invited to
Ronald Reagan's White House to delivery his message about the evils
of apartheid only after he won the prize in 1984.

"And very occasionally, but only very occasionally, it can influence
politics on the ground," Lundestad said.

Perhaps the best example, he said, was the 1996 prize to Bishop
Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos Horta. The prize-winners themselves said
the award was influential in helping East Timor break away from
Indonesia in 1999 and gain independence in 2002.

Before winning the prize, Ramos Horta traveled the world seeking
support, but no one wanted to see him or finance his movement, so he
slept in railway stations, Lundestad said.

Lundestad said East Timor gained independence mainly because of
economic, social and political collapse in Indonesia at the end of the 1990s.

"But the prize certainly contributed. The world certainly cared about
what was happening on that tiny half of that tiny island," he said.

(Editing by Caroline Drees)