Norwegians woke up Saturday morning to hear the president of the United States on morning newscasts, publicly bashing their country. Donald Trump didn’t like the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choice for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, prompting Norway’s foreign minister to once again explain that the independent committee decides who wins, “not Norway” or its government.
Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide emphasized on national radio Saturday morning that the Nobel Committee “is completely independent of Norwegian authorities.” The Nobel Peace Prize is therefore “given by the Nobel Committee, not by Norway.” After hearing US President Donald Trump’s remarks at a Republican rally in Syracuse, New York, and how Trump also belittled prize winner Navi Pillay, Eide added that he thinks Pillay “was a very deserving winner, and I think that’s what should be the focus today.”
Many others have also hailed the prize to Pillay and her efforts to enforce international law, with the exception of Israeli leaders. Pillay, a South African lawyer who now serves as a judge on the International Court of Justice, also led the United Nations commission that has defined Israel’s war on Gaza as genocide. That sparked criticism of the Nobel Committee’s decision from Israel’s foreign ministry that was even sharper than Trump’s.
The US president, meanwhile, started blasting and even threatening Norway during a lengthy speech at the Republican election campaign event in upstate New York. Trump has made it clear over the years that he thinks he should win the Nobel Peace Prize, even after launching a war of his own against Iran and failing so far to settle Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Instead he claimed that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was “awarded to a liberal person who works at the United Nations that nobody’s ever heard of. I’d never heard of her… but congratulations anyway.” The 85-year-old Pillay is well-known by many others, however, as the first non-white woman to become a Supreme Court justice in South Africa when apartheid ended. She helped defend Nelson Mandela (also a Nobel Laureate), served on both the International Criminal Court and as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, while devoting her entire career to preserving international law and promoting peace.
Trump went on to claim that “in all the (unspecified) wars that I’ve settled, I never spoke to the UN,” before asserting that “the United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel Peace Prize but didn’t, and this is an idelible stain on the country of Norway and those people (an apparent reference to the Nobel Committee) that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision.”
Trump further declared that “The Nobel Peace Prize has been forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilization.” He perhaps wasn’t aware that the deputy leader of the five-member Nobel Committee, Asle Toje, was nominated for his seat on the committee by Norway’s far-right Progress Party, has a doctorate from Cambridge where he specialized in international relations and war studies, and has been a firm supporter of Israel for years.
Nor are at least two other members of the committee, former government ministers and leaders within Norway’s Conservative Party (Kristin Clemet) and Center Party (Anne Enger), viewed as “radical ideologues who are anti-democracy” or “enemies of civilization.”
Then came the veiled, if rambling, threats from Trump: “We will not forget, Norway, that you didn’t give this prize to the greatest record in history … not eight wars, we should have had eight Nobel Prizes for each war … but that you didn’t give the Nobel Prize for Peace to the United States of America is just another sign of how Norway and all these others are ripping off our country.”
The Swedish prize benefactor Alfred Nobel had specified in his will from 1895 that while Swedish organizations would be responsible for Nobel Prizes in literature, medicine and other fields, he wanted a Norwegian committee to award the annual Nobel Peace Prize. The committee is still meant to reflect the political make-up of the Norwegian Parliament, but neither current Members of Parliament nor current government ministers are allowed to sit on it.
Instead, the parties represented in Parliament nominate candidates to fill seats on the five-member Nobel Committee for six-year terms. The terms of three out of the current five members on the committee (Clemet, Enger and committee leader Jørgen Watne Frydnes) will end on December 31. It remains unclear whether they’ll continue in their roles or be replaced.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
